FNH 3-Gun Championship 2011 Day 1, Stage 7, 8 and 9

The FNH 3-Gun Championship, the crowning event of the 3-Gun Nation series, is well underway in Glengary, West Virginia. They’ve got some neat stages and some interesting set guns, like the Barrett MRAD and an FNH less-lethal launcher of some sort, and a prize table that includes tens of thousands of dollars and around 100 FN SCARs and stripped receivers. With 250 competitors (including the best in the business) they’ve divided up the stages so you shoot three per day either in the morning or the afternoon. I thought it might be interesting to take you guys through the stages for the match and give you all a peek at what the “big boys” in 3-Gun are up against.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGDZib_MD_k

Stage 9 started behind the Barrett MRAD in .338 Lapua Magnum with your finger on the trigger and sights on a target over 500 yards away. The second the buzzer goes off you break the shot and then skedaddle, as you only get one shot and waiting for confirmation of a hit wastes time. Rifle shooting comes next, taking steel targets at unknown distances between 100 and 300 yards, then off to a whole mess of pistol plates, and finally into a house to shoot out a window at some shotgun targets. Fun stuff. Despite the RO not calling all of my hits I still got out of that section with a reasonable time. I’m running near the middle of the pack at the moment, but we have yet to have the big names run through.

Stage 7 involves four 50-yard slug shots, a bunch of plates that can be either pistol or shotgun, and then rifle shooting at unknown distances between 100 and 190 yards. My plan was to engage the 4 slug targets then empty the shotgun on the steel to the left, reload on the move to the middle targets, abandon the shotgun after the first reload and run the rest with pistol. Missing that shotgun slug target put me a couple rounds down and threw my plan out the window necessitating a standing reload. Even still I’m running in the middle of the pack again.

Stage 8 started with walking through a wooded area with a shotgun and pistol taking down steel plates, then moving to rifle targets at unknown distances between 100 and 300 yards. I think I see a pattern for these last three. My plan for this stage was to run the shotgun dry then engage the rest of the targets with pistol, since reloading the shotgun would be too slow and all of the shots were within comfortable pistol range for me. Despite forgetting whether I left the mag in my pistol when I dumped it and having a failure to feed malfunction this one I did GREAT on, I’m only about a second behind the Air Force Shooting Team. Not perfect, but getting better.

Today is stages 1-3, then Saturday closes the competition proper. I can’t wait for the full results to come in.