08-11-2016, 03:21 PM
Talking about shooting rapid strings of shots I once saw a young girl win an F Class match by shooting as fast as she could crank the bolt. The results were being displayed on a monitor next to her so she was essentially 'driving' the shots around the target as the wind slowly changed. Meanwhile the rest of us were taking the full 15 minutes allocated for 2 sighters and 10 shots to score, roughly one per minute. We would watch the wind flags and when they were the all similar to the previous shot take the shot. Trouble is the wind had changed so much in 60 seconds that 'chasing the spotter' (using the previous shot to inform the next shot) was impossible.
This girl didn't know any fancy wind judging techniques and had little experience in shooting. She just cranked off all 12 shots in less than a minute and chased the spotter to win the match. You can't do this when the targets are being pulled up and down by a butts party, the feedback is too slow. But with electronic targets, fall of shot feedback is about 1 second to seeing it on the screen. That was an epiphany for everyone that day. From then on everyone started to speed up their strings and paid less attention to flags. Pity really because reading wind from trees, flags and mirage is a cool skill. Nowadays it's Kestrel wind-captures and TV screens.
This girl didn't know any fancy wind judging techniques and had little experience in shooting. She just cranked off all 12 shots in less than a minute and chased the spotter to win the match. You can't do this when the targets are being pulled up and down by a butts party, the feedback is too slow. But with electronic targets, fall of shot feedback is about 1 second to seeing it on the screen. That was an epiphany for everyone that day. From then on everyone started to speed up their strings and paid less attention to flags. Pity really because reading wind from trees, flags and mirage is a cool skill. Nowadays it's Kestrel wind-captures and TV screens.