Pattern 14 to the range!

Today just struck me as a good day for the range, so I loaded up the Pattern 14 and some old South African .303 ammo and headed out while it was still somewhat not insanely hot. The range wasn't crowded at all, and as usual, 90% of the shooters there on the rifle line had some variant of an AR. Man I remember the day when I was the subject of scorn at a range or two for having an AR back when they weren't common. Now I'm the odd duck again for not having one. Sigh...

But me and the Pattern 14 got down to business, and business was good.

Firing off the mat--I'm still the only one here that does that--the old rifle put almost every round on the 8" steel plate at 100M. The few that missed were completely my fault. This old war horse is still solid and capable. I have to raise the sight leaf and with the aperture in the lowest setting and when I do it hits right on the steel so regularly that it's kinda boring. But it felt good to lie on that mat and pull that stock up into my shoulder, bringing that trigger back slowly until it broke, the report and the recoil being followed a second later by a sharp ringing noise as the steel target downrange rocked. It doesn't get much better than this morning.

After a time, I put the old iron away and broke out the Ruger 10/22 on the .22 steel range, just to work on my offhand shooting, which is still sub-par.

I player over here for half an hour or so then hit the road.

And in an amazing range coincidence, I was unable to find my shooter's earmuffs in my truck when I got there, so I asked to borrow a pair from the range. Well the range stopped issuing loaners this past month but the range officers know me and as a courtesy they popped open their supply cabinet and gave me a pair from their lost and found...and that pair had my initials clearly painted on both muffs! Well I guess I know where those got to. But what are the odds of them reaching into a box of earmuffs and pulling out my own pair, a set that I didn't even know was missing?