Blackpowder shooting results

The 2024 Alaska Territorial Muzzleloading Event is now in the history books. This five-day shooting match was the first in my experience where no rain fell at all. In fact, we only had one day with cloudy skies and that only lasted about a half-day. The rest of the time it was hot and dusty. The mosquitoes weren’t as bad as usual either!

While the weather was great, my shooting wasn’t. I only entered three aggregates and two of them were shot off a cross-sticks bench rest. I’ve mentioned previously about how my left shoulder has been acting up and it did so again at the shoot. I couldn’t hold my sighted smoothbore long-gun in the offhand position very well, as required for this aggregate, and my scores reflected that fact.

Shooting my blackpowder cartridge rifle off the bench wasn’t much better. This rifle has an 1880’s period scope mounted on it. The scope is mounted such that after each shot, the shooter must pull the scope back into battery in the mount. All the scope adjustments occur with the rear mount rather than internally in the scope, like modern scopes do. If I do my part, the rifle and scope shoot quite well. If I forget to pull the scope back into battery, the rifle shoots to a different point of aim. I forgot to reset the scope for probably a quarter of my shots during the four individual matches.

My final hope for shooting a decent aggregate now rested sorely with my inline muzzleloader. However, I found that I didn’t have the correct lubricated patches for shooting round balls with this rifle. I’m not sure why. Either I had used them up and forgotten to replace them or I had moved them to another rifle’s shooting box. I improvised with some other unlubricated patches I had, individually hand lubing them, and loaded them up. Every shot wanted to shoot about three inches left of my aiming point. When I allowed for that, the next shot would go high, low, or somewhere other than where I wanted it to go.

At that point, I gave up. You’ve heard my “excuses,” but let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Shooting is a perishable skill, and if you don’t use it, you lose it! I hadn’t fired a shot since last year’s Territorial. My perishable skill was showing big time this year! I’m hoping with some regular practice, the proper shooting patches, a little memory check, and some improvement with my left shoulder that everything will improve for next year and I will be more competitive again.

So how did I do? Unbelievably, I won three aggregate medals for the three aggregates I competed in. The medals were two gold, for first place in both the inline muzzleloader and the sighted smoothbore matches and a silver for the blackpowder cartridge matches. How can this be, you ask, after hearing me confess to some dismal shooting? Here’s the inside skinny. I was the only shooter in both the inline and smoothbore matches. It would be harder to not win gold when you are the only shooter. There were four or five shooters in the blackpowder cartridge aggregate, so I earned that medal.

Now for the sad news for the Territorial this year. There were only eight shooters for everything this year. I’ve attended Alaska Territorials in the past where there were 35 to 40 shooters. This year’s attendance was probably the lowest ever. Why is that? First, the average age of the regular attendees is getting older. The youngest guy at this year’s shoot was 59 years old. The oldest guy was 82. Younger folks don’t seem interested in this type of competition, for whatever reason.

Second, several of the regular guys missed this year because of health or possibly work commitments. Health, I understand, but not being able to attend one day out of a five day shoot because of work seems sad to me. The final thought we speculated on was the fact that getting shooting supplies has been difficult. Black powder has been hard for some folks to come by, and percussion caps have been almost impossible to find. Not having the supplies necessary to shoot is an obvious deterrent to shooting.

One thing that pleased me to no end is the fact that all the appliances in my small motorhome worked very well. I was especially thankful for the generator and air conditioning after the shooting day was done!