Ping Pong Harry and Flyswatter Rick

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Our club has two interesting characters. Harry is a shooter that was shooting benchrest before most of you were born. Rick has been shooting almost as long. Harry has taken to shooting ping pong balls at 300 meters. That's right -300 meters. Harry doesn't use some fancy a$$ benchrest rig. He uses a Savage in 338 Lapua. Harry applies all of his knowledge and skills from 40+ years of benchrest shooting to handloading for that beast. Most of his reloading tooling is made by Manufacturers most of us have never heard of. A few pieces of tooling I have made for Harry on my own lathe. Best group I have seen Harry shoot was three shots in a ragged hole at three hundred meters. Now Harry has decided that that damn ball should be hit with the first shot out of a cold barrel. He's up to 3 out of 5 times and working on getting that to five hits out of five shots from a cold barrel. For those of you that think this is easy -it's not easy, it's impossible! I wish I knew half of what Harry's forgotten.

I'm Rick. I'm a heart attack survivor. While on blood thinners, I could not handle any recoil, so I shot 22's. A lot. One day I shot at a fly and nailed it with a nice spray of fly guts all around the bullet hole. From then on, I've been hunting the critters every time I go to the range. The little buggers are hard to hit! Particularily at 30 meters. Most of the time they are moving. Now that I can handle recoil again, I still spend most of my time on the 30 meter range hunting flies. Don't know why folks have lumped me in with Harry as an interesting character, I'll never be the shooter Harry is.

Your clubs have any interesting characters you would like to tell us about? No last names in order to protect the guilty...
 
I wish our club had good guys like that. Most of the time I try to hit the range when there will be the least amount of people there possible. Don't get me wrong, I am a sociable guy and like good company, but most people today see a good day at the range as shooting the most amount of rounds possible, they want quantity over quality. I like taking my time and banging out a few good shots, it is sometimes hard to do with someone sprayin' and prayin' at the next bench.

Our most interesting character passed on a few years back. He taught the firearms courses and hunter ed, took the time to volunteer and help the younger crowd learn how to do it properly. And he was a master with a muzzle loader, not the new modern in-lines, but the real old timers. Some of his were percussion caps, some were flint locks, I think he even had a match lock in his collection too. I would dare say he took a few ping pong balls at the 100 yard range with his open sighted front stuffers.
 
Harry glues the ping pong ball to a 2' square of black foam board so he can see it at 300 meters. Even with a 32X scope, it is still a small target. Some of the guys got together and bought a mess of ping pong balls for him and we drew little faces on them. Last one he shot in the nose. He draws quite a crowd. 50lbs of sand bags and a spotting scope to read mirage and wind. It's getting so that folks walk down to the 300m berm just to see for themselves if he really hit it. They usually walk back just shaking their heads.You really have to see it to believe it.
 
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