With the king salmon fisheries shut down, time to focus on shooting

Something I wanted to mention in last week’s column but failed to do, was an interesting observation I recently read. The writer was promoting the idea of referring to July 4th not by date but rather by description. He was suggesting that everybody worldwide has a July 4th, but only Americans have that date as “Independence Day.” He wanted folks to wish each other a happy Independence Day rather than a happy Fourth of July. Makes sense to me!

With both the Little Susitna and the Deshka shut down for the rest of the king season, I’m staying with the shooting thing as my summer recreation this year, at least until the silvers start returning. After several days of range safety work, I did finally do some shooting last week. I found out two things: first, I’m rusty and, second, my shoulder isn’t totally healed yet.

Shooting is one of those activities where the old adage “use it or loose it” applies. Maintaining the eye-hand coordination, proper breathing techniques, and other facets of a good shooting technique require the regular practice of those skills. Only shooting a few times a year doesn’t tend to support muscle memory and proper breathing without a lot of conscious effort. I’ve learned over time that I can regain my shooting skills but it will take several more sessions at the range to polish up my rusty techniques!

Regarding my shoulder, I’m close but not quite healed. I was shooting a couple of different small caliber centerfire rifles and everything was going as well as I expected. When I decided to fire some rounds through a medium caliber centerfire rifle, however, I felt the recoil noticeably in my right shoulder. My takeaway lesson here is that I will need to be careful in how much shooting I do at the Alaska State Muzzleloading Territorial match starting July 13 and running through July 16.

This match will be held at Ft. Wick, located off Yoder Road near Talkeetna. I missed it entirely last year because of health issues with one of our little dogs. I hope things go better this year! I do have a couple of potential conflicts, though. Two different friends have weddings scheduled within a half-hour of each other on Saturday, the 15th. One wedding is in Big Lake and the other is in Palmer. I’m thinking my best course of action, rather than show favoritism to one or the other, is to stay at the territorial, skip both weddings, and look at the Facebook pictures later! Then I don’t have to dress up either!

Assuming I can shoot the required number of shots for the various aggregates over the course of the match, I’m planning to shoot the sighted smoothbore and rifled musket aggregates at a minimum. I might even slip the smoothbore aggregate in too. The reason I’m a little hesitant here is that, in past range trips to develop better loads for all three of these guns, I found boosting the powder charges showed the best accuracy potential. A steady diet of 70 to 80 grains of blackpowder with close to a one-ounce lead projectile will result in significant recoil in a 30 to 40 shot aggregate!

Last year, I had spent both time and money assembling a sighted smoothbore firearm which met the requirements specified by the territorial match rules. That involved some professional gunsmithing work to get a non-adjustable rear sight mounted on the barrel after assembling the firearm from various parts I had purchased over the Internet.

I wanted the gun for this specific sighted smoothbore aggregate match and, in hindsight, had invested more money than I probably should have. It wasn’t my life savings, but it was a little more than I needed to in order to achieve the same results. However, I was in deep enough to justify spending some additional funds to have the rear sight mounted in a dovetail professionally cut into the barrel.

While this long gun does have some hunting potential, I have other muzzleloaders, which are better suited to either smoothbore small game hunting with birdshot or big game hunting using a round ball. I could probably offset the original cost somewhat by selling the extra and duplicate parts I had accumulated from using a couple of different “parts” guns to assemble one reasonably good finished firearm. But, with my luck, as soon as I do, I’ll need the part I just sold!