Halloween is traditionally about the fabled creatures of the underworld. Ghosts, Ghouls and Zombies take many forms in the imagination. Increasingly, it has become acceptable for Halloween costume design to move away from the traditional spirit, under world, fairy story and magical themes, and to move on to just plain having fun. And that’s just what Guyana Sport Shooting Foundation did last Saturday 27thOctober, 2018 when for the third year, BM Soat Auto Sales backed the GSSF in their Annual themed competition which was a very keenly contested one, all within the confines of the safety rules and watchful eyes of Range Master, Mr. Dallas Thomas and his Team of Range Officials.
The Timehri Range transformed just after noon as members turned out in their costumes, with appearances from the Hunter, a Sport-Shooter, a Construction Worker, a Rifle Shooter, the Black Panther, a Biker, Lara Croft, the Gold-Tooth Gangster and even Count Dracula risked the afternoon sun to come out and participate, all doing so within the safety confines of the sport.
Shooters were placed in two squads shooting two stages simultaneously: ‘Related” with 9 IPSC Targets and 4 Steel poppers set out behind various screens and “Big Barricade Mash Up” which consisted of 10 metric targets, 7 no-shoot targets, 5 plates and 4 poppers. On start signal, competitors were to engage targets 1-7 identified from behind a barricade and thereafter proceed to either shooting box set on the left and right of the barricade and engage the targets in front of that corresponding box. After doing so, the competitor had to proceed to the remaining box on the other side of the barricade and engage the remaining targets.The shooters came up with various strategies to engage these targets in both stagesso as to beat the clock and register good hits to score.
Participants then converged on the final and third stage for the afternoon ‘Quad Standards” which seemed like a final easy stage to end the afternoon with 4 targets set up down-range and 3 shooting lines set up at varying distances in front of them. Shooters started at the first line set up 120 feet away from the targets and had to engage the targets with only one round, make a mandatory reload and then engage again with onlyone round freestyle. Participants then had to proceed to Line 2, engage with only one round, make a mandatory reload and then engage with onlyone round strong hand only. Then finally participants had to proceed to Line 1 which was set 45 feet from the targets, engage with only one round, make a mandatory reload and engage with onlyone round weak hand only.
The action continued as shooter after shooter took the sandy walk to reset the stages and disappointingly, zero-ed the stage because of the misses discovered after. Only 2 shooters managed to secure a positive hit factor in this stage thereby changing the dynamics of the possible match outcome: Vidushi Persaud-McKinnon and Lennox Braithwaite.