Guns

We shoot Big Bore Handgun Silhouettes at 50, 100, 150 and 200m, with open sights, and interesting guns¹.

The bank on the left are standard Big Bore targets. I can’t hit those for shit².

The ones on the right (look carefully) are Big Bore Unlimited targets. Apparently I can hit those quite well³.

Same day, same gun, hit more of the small ones than the big ones.

Yea, I don’t know how that happened either⁵.

¹ In this case, a Thompson Contender in 300 Whisp-R, which is a damn nice round, and a damn nice gun, I got the barrel from Mike Bellm himself.

² I only hit 24/40, while the winning score was 39/40. BUT! In my defense, this is the first time I was shooting after having cataract surgery to my left eye⁴ and my old sight settings were way off.

³ Got 32/40, which is a decent if not excellent score.

⁴ For my sins I am cross-dominant.

⁵ On the small bore side, I only shot a 28, which should have placed me maybe third or so. But the other people shot worse than I did. Sucks to be them.

(Previously)

This time the weather was a lot better.

I didn’t take many pictures, the above is a crappy cellphone pic. Nice idea of what the area (Bot River mouth, that’s Arabella on the right) looks like.

I was there for five of the six days. This is too much (up at 06:00, get home > 17:30) but they are desperately short of guns and without guns the competition can’t happen.

They do take good care of us, this was breakfast the one day (admittedly the best looking of the lot, but all the food was good).

Hopefully next year I can get away with two days max.

This was Sunday, the 24th of September. Cape Field Trial Club Retriever Field Trial competition. They need someone to make a loud noise* while someone else tosses a dead bird (or sometimes a live one) and then doggie has to fetch (in this specific event the tossed bird was a decoy, the dog first had to fetch three other birds and not the one it saw going down — a Real Test of control, both self- for the dog and the control over the dog by the handler).

In the picture above, we’re next to the Bot River close to the town of, well, Botrivier. By the time we left there was an inch of water on the ground.

This was a part of the N2 heading back home. They closed it later the evening.

This was the Bot River the next morning. The bridge washed away a bit later.

We were supposed to do it again on the Monday, but with the N2 and at least three of the alternative routes closed that event was cancelled.

My shooting buddy was trapped in Pringle Bay until Wednesday afternoon, waiting for debris to be cleared off one of the two roads available to him (the other one might take a while they say).

So if anyone asks what I did during the Great Storm of 2023, I can say that I was sitting in the rain playing with some dogs.

* And South African gun laws being what they are, not just anybody can make the noise. You need a licence and stuff. So they call on us, and we like it because free ammo, they treat us like royalty and we get a nice certificate out of it, for NHSA purposes.

Where basically the same bunch of fellows take to the bush (metaphorically speaking) in search of venison, this time not rolling a trailer on the way there.

At the last hunt, we met a fellow who knew a fellow and some subsequent negotiations resulted in an option on blue wildebeest at a relatively good price (R39/kilo dressed with head off but skin on).

So I stayed over in Bellville, so that hunting buddy could pick me up at 0500, pick up other hunting buddy, and go to third hunting buddy’s place, leave from there. I woke up at four with a sore throat, made a quick trip to M-Kem just up the road, got some miracle snake oil, OD’ed on that all the way, worked well.

The little cottage is up on a hill overlooking a part of the camp, with the main road and the lights from Marchand in the distance. Notice the tree on the right-hand side of the braai…

…yup, that’s where the farmer leaves the feed out. We could have shot one or two right there but that would not be ethical now, would it?

The camp also has kudu, sable, springbok, impala and gemsbok, but for looking at only.

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We’ve been doing this Kalahari thing for a while now, and they tend to all run together in one’s memory after a while, so this year my hunting buddy decided to make things memorable by rolling his trailer on our way there.

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