Jewish Marksman's Shooting Update

Over the weekend I shot another NRA High Power match with the Israeli Mauser.  I was a little under the weather but shot fairly well, except for some zero issues I'll discuss below:

Standing: 170-2 (85%)

Rapid Sitting: 181-1 (90.5%)

Rapid Prone: 167 (83.5%)

Slow Prone: 174-2 (87%)

Total: 692-5 (86.5%)

Standing suffered from some zero confusion.  The past few months I have been playing with the ammunition loading so I have not been careful about zeros from match to match, sort of finding the zero as I went.  So I kept my slow prone zero from last month going into this match, and it turns out that on this rifle the zero is different for me in different positions.  I think I lost about 10+ points standing before I resolved this, and probably 5 or so sitting.  Rapid prone I had some bolt issues that forced me to take some shots too quickly, but also the zero was off. For the first time I applied grease to the bolt before a match, and this turned out to be a mistake...I'm going back to a clean bolt with dry lube only.  Basically the bolt became difficult to lift, but was fixed as soon as I wiped the grease from the cocking cam area.

The target upper left is my slow prone target.  For reference, the black is 6" wide.  The horizontal spread is fairly tight.  For now, I'm on the fence as to the cause of the 7's.  Certainly the fact the sight radius is so short is not helping, but I am going to play with different aperture sizes and see if that helps.  Obviously the majority of the shots are in the 10/9 rings, so probably some of the 7's can also be blamed on less than perfect technique on my part.  I can say all the 7's were called, although I was a little surprised they were 7's and not 8's.  Truth is I did not practice any prone last month before the match, so my trigger technique was probably a little rusty.

Overall, I think that a 90% (Expert class) score is very attainable soon.  I took careful notes on the zero changes for each position so hopefully next month I will be dialed in better.  Last month I spent most of my time practicing the sitting position, so this month I'll split my time primarily between prone and standing.

But perhaps most importantly, the Israeli Mauser continues to win fans in the club.