Dusty Devil Dale

When I worked for Ca Dept of Fish and Game, a fellow came in visiting from Texas. He wore a bandage on his leg, covering a huge healing wound from a big Western Diamondback that managed to swim up and climb over the transome of his bass boat. He had a gun, but obviously couldn't shoot it in the boat. The big snake went right after him and bit his leg. He'd received 12 units of antivenom (Yul is correct, thats over $1 million cost), and had eleven weeks of hospitalization and rehab. Statistically, about 60% of bite victims lose use of a limb. <3% get a direct bite to a large vein, which is usually fatal without immediate ICU treatment. Many bites to recreationists (non-handlers) occur on the legs when people disturb or try to kill a snake and it comes toward them, causing them to back away and trip and fall. All snakes can move amazingly fast if provoked. IMO, handling them is just an unnecessary risk. An open sight .22 rifle dispatches the biggest of them pretty easily at a safe distance. (you do have to use that little bump on the top of the rifle muzzle)

That is when you need to watch real closely. Complacency makes their job easier. I didn't see a rattler on my ranch for over six years. I knew they were there. We found big, wide tracks on the dusty roads at times and found a shed skin beside the house foundation. I always looked for them when working, but I never saw one. Then finally one morning, I spotted a 4- footer coiled and nearly invisible in low shrubbery -- about a foot from my hand. It was a cool morning, and I think that save me some grief. He/she had a real bad day, but I haven't forgotten it. My eyes are always scanning the ground ahead. My wife is sick and tired of hearing my cautions to look where she steps. We've since (8+ years) found 4 or 5, right around the house. But I seldom see anything but tracks when I'm out doing log work. If you have habitat and groceries (rodents, etc) figure they are there.

I was surprised last month to discover that I can no longer hear the pitch of a rattler; even from a large snake. Just last year, my old ears could hear that familiar pitch very well, but now I can only slow down and scan carefully with my eyes. I guess I've been spoiled, living where rattlesnakes are the only venomous ones to be concerned with. Be aware -- things can change with age.

Many (60) years ago I had a molar on my lower jaw extracted, due to a vertical fracture. Then a couple years later. I had exactly the same thing occur on the other side. In those days, nobody had ever heard of implants, so I learned to live with the two gaps and frequently crushed and bleeding sides of my tongue. Today, after 50+ years, the entire row of teeth on both sides of both gaps is strongly tilted 45 deg. into the gap. It occurred gradually, changing my bite surfaces, causing extensive surface wear on all except my front incisors. Two years ago, I needed a rear molar extracted. I didn't hesitate 10 seconds on the implant decision. Glad I went for it. It is now my best chewing surface. My advice-- go for it. Get the implant. It will save a lot of later problems and pain. Implants are not the complicated deal, medically, that they were 10 years ago, but they do have some associated $ cost.

I had the shot years ago for a finger joint that kept painfully locking up (classic trigger finger). The shot relaxed the tendon and the pain was mostly gone before I made it out to my truck. Last year I dislocated my left thumb (3rd time over ten years). I quickly developed arthritis, such that I could not rapidly cock my pistols (I shoot two handed). I was given a cortisone shot and it did absolutely nothing. The only thing that helps the pain is Ibuprofen and Voltaren (Diclofenac Sodium) gel. But lately I've developed a skin allergy to the Voltaren, so I'm just putting up with the 24-7 pain.

Seems self-limiting. If the T.O. doesn't hear or otherwise understand that the shooter is ready, why would he or she press the button? If unsure, just ask them -- it isnt like that takes place on the clock.

This has come up a number of times in the past. The huge concensus has been that there is no requirement. You just need to indicate ready to the T.O. and counters/spotters. But let's back up for a minute. In recent few (very few) years, CAS has been drifting toward a race gun game, with progressively bigger and closer targets, expensively modified guns, and much less complexity in stages. The total stage time is all that many of us outwardly care about now. Without judging all of that, for the moment, IMO it would serve our purposes to remember what brought most of us here to Cowboy Action Shooting in the first place. If we only wanted fast action, there are a lot of very fun, faster gun sports to partake in. Many of us also shoot in those contests and enjoy them. But we came HERE to play cowboy for a time. To dress up in cowboy clothes, strap on our pretty single action guns, shoot among western buildings and props and, to an extent, enjoy living the scenarios we are shooting in. The start lines and story lines were always a way to add more COWBOY to the shooting fun. Many of us still enjoy all of that. I personally hope the game doesn't move entirely over to race-gun shooting in a cowboy hat, it won't be as imaginative or fun. I am noticing that the clubs that still insert a generous amount of -- call it "cowboy" -- into the shooting experience are growing and attracting new younger members. Attracting younger folks amid the array of alternative much faster and more modern shooting sports will always be a challenge. What draws them to our game is when they stop to watch us laughing, cheering, and playing cowboy, dressed up in western dress with our smoking guns. Corny as they can seem, the start lines are a part of all of that. Without the Western reenactment part, it is just target shooting without the movement or big prizes. JMHO. BUT THERE IS NO SPECIFIC REQUIREMENT. T.O.s just need to be sure communication is clear enough.

Hard to beat my wife's .38sp 5-round Ladysmith revolver (vintage 1980s). It is tiny (2" barrel) lightweight and deadly dependable.

I'm taking all of mine with me. Where I'm going, I likely will need them.

It sounds like there is room for someone to market a centrifugal device, using a pizza pan or big pie plate on some kind of turntable, with oversize shot escape holes in the rim of the pan and a wider outside pan to catch the shot. --- Just thinking too much.

Several years ago I loaded up 800 pistol rounds, dropping tray after tray of cartridges (with brand new brass !) into my big plastic receiving jug. When I quit for the morning, I noticed the powder magazine was empty and I had no idea when that had occurred. I tried weighing the cartridges, but between case and lead weight variability, there was no way to reliably discriminate the missing 3 gn of powder. I tried shaking them and listening with a stethoscope, but that wasn't reliable either. 800 rounds went into the practice box. A week later the 650 tool insert had a new blue powder check. Problem solved. ----- I have never repeated the costly mistake. I still get a couple of those squib rounds in every practice session. Now each of my 9 different caliber or load tool-tray inserts has a powder check in place. IMO that is money well spent. I have no idea if there are better powder check dies out there. I'm just used to buying Dillon equipment --and I'm probably too old to change now.

The energy for discouraging various medical testing in older individuals flows from the federal government agencies and insurance companies who want to duck the higher cost of older patient medicine by advocating the Sweedish model = zero medical care after age 55 unless patient pays for it directly. I will gladly pay the small cost for my annual PSA test, 5-year colonoscopy and any other diagnostics needed, if either Medicare or my secondary insurance deny them. Sadly, I remember a previous President who also subscribed to the Scandanavian model and said, "just give grandma a pain shot". He could say that knowing he and his family would get the best care available at Bethesda. Good for thee, but not for me.

Yep. Confidence comes from knowing what to do and how AND when to do it.

A bunch of men talking about which style guns are best for women ---LOL. Where are the woman participants, and what do THEY say they prefer? Their answers might surprise us. Most men can't comprehend the physical problems a fragile or small frame woman (especially one with arthritis) has in trying to rack most semi-autos, or even reach the mag release. My wife cannot begin to rack even a small .22 caliber semi. So I once bought her a Ruger Tomcat to try. She could not operate the barrel-break cocking mechanism, so the Tomcat became another safe queen. She carries and shoots a 5-shot Ladysmith .38sp revolver that we bought for her in the 70s. Seeing her shoot rapid 1.5 inch 5-shot groups at 10 yards with 158 gn ammo has impressed more than one CCW instructor over the years. I have no worries about her needing more ammo capacity. Her being able to place a round accurately on a target (and off their body armor) is IMO more important than we like to give credit. I have confidence she would not require more than one round per target to neutralize an attack.

You might check the hammer plunger to be sure its spring is not weak or broken. The plunger pushes down on the rear of cylinder stop, forcing the front end upward to index the cylinder. But a weak plunger should affect all of the cylinders intermittently. So if it is always the same cylinder out of time, as others have asked, then the problem is likely not the plunger. I worked on a Vaquero recently that had .030 runout in the base pin boring, due to wear from years of not being cleaned. That caused one cylinder to intermittantly index off center just enough to interfere with primer detonation. A replacement cylinder fixed it.

The commercial aerosol wasp sprays have a lot of pressure and not very much pesticide, so they have a nasty habit of running out just as you get the hive riled up. What commercial guys use is a weed sprayer full of thin Dawn Soap solution. Just a small amount of soap drops them right to the ground. They are dead within just a few seconds. A coarse spray will soak the nest and kill everybody that is at home. I have also stood there and fogged the nest with finer spray as they came out. It works, but you need to watch out for the individuals returning behind you from the fields. They come in HOT! It's best to spray the nest at night when more wasps are at home.

V. good that you asked. Hopefully nobody would just have tried it. The splatter from buckshot off of steel plates at our close ranges would probably be quite a safety hazard, even if the targets are knockdown. Not all of the shot cloud hits the moving plate. Some shot usually splashes off of stands or other hardware. Buckshot might (not sure) also cup target plates worse because of the individual pellet mass.

That is right. Who knows if they used nautical or land measure to measure a lake, in those expeditions. And considering what they were doing, I doubt it really matters very much.

You're correct. Somebody needs to go back to math class. A league is 3.452 miles. x 15 leagues is 51.78 miles.

I should mention that when I found it, I had just read about Estudillo's expedition about a week earlier in researching for a historical fisheries manuscript I was working on. When I turned the ball over, wiped away the mud, and saw a Franciscan Cross, the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck. I realized I was holding a piece of California history in my muddy hand.

Related Item of possible interest. In 1818, Lieutenant José María Estudillo led a Spanish expedition into Central California, looking for locations to site missions. In the spring of that year, his diary records the soldiers entering the San Joaquin Valley. He crossed southward and westward across the San Gabriel River and San Pedro River (Kawea and Tule Rivers, respectively) where he encountered the huge Tasche Lake (Tulare Lake- Buenavista Lake complex). This is an interior, terminal lake that historically gathered the undiverted flows from the Kern, Tule, Kaweah and Kings Rivers from the east, and from numerous smaller warersheds draining from the east side of the Coast Range Mountains. Estudillo, in his letters, describes his attempt to estimate the lake's expansive width by firing a series of four gunshots across the water. He estimated the width to be "about 13 leagues" (45 miles). The actual width at that location would have been about 28-33 miles. That was a fair estimate, considering the technique! The photo is a 2-1/4" hammered bronze cannonball, marked with two deeply hand-graved Franciscan Crosses (one is visible). I recovered it out of a freshly disced field, while working near the present-day town of Allensworth, in 1998. The State Historic Preservation Office catalogued and analyzed the artifact at the time, but they declined to take posession, leaving it in my private collection. Upon analysis, they agreed wit me that the ball "has high liklihood" of resulting from one of those four 1818 Estudillo gunshots.

SHB is clear enough. But doesn't a Stage Instruction take priority within a particular stage (obvious exception would be safety issues). In the end it boils down to writing Stage Instructions competently, so there are not conflicts with SHB rules or conventions.

Agree. The "shoot until down" instruction can conflict with the stage round count direction, unless the (rounds)+ notation is used -- it usually is for KD targets.

It might have been a target failure-- most probably was. The wheel settled to a slow pendulum with one plate at the bottom. The shooter's hits simply tilted the plate back against the frame. But in a shoot-off situation, with two shooters in direct competition, how do you do a fair re-shoot. The point is that the shooter was prevented from moving on to other targets by the shoot until down Stage Instruction.

Have you seen this verbiage in Stage Instructions? I see it often. So what does it really say? On its face, it says the shooter MUST re-engage the target until it falls down. Because it is a "Stage Instruction", it technically overrides the permissive language in SHB and in other places, saying knockdown shotgun targets 'MAY' be re-engaged. By this Stage Instruction, dropping the plate is REQUIRED. So shooters technically cannot just accept a miss and stop the re-engagement. I guess if/ when they eventually run out of ammo, they get the miss -- or is it also a Procedural (failing to follow stage instructions)? It isnt just an inconsequential piece of rhetoric. I recently watched a shooter fire 8 extra shotgun rounds, trying to drop a single target. They consistently shot over the top. They stopped when their ammo was exhausted. Several years ago, I also watched a very good shooter competing for fun in the day-after shoot-offs of a Western Regional SASS Match (that he had won the previous day). He engaged and hit the last plate on a T-Star repeatedly, but it did not detach. He exhausted his ammo. That brought loud laughter from the crowd, but the shooter didn't enjoy it as much. So with the above instruction, was dropping the plates actually required? Just reading the instruction, I would say yes, it was. A better-written Stage Instruction might be: "Engage the Shotgun targets. Targets left standing are misses. Any shotgun target may be re-engaged" Comon sense is that nobody intends for shooters to have run the clock out or to exhaust ammunition, rather than just accept a miss. But shouldn't we we say what we mean in writing our common-usage Stage Instructions? Just my thoughts. (Others' mileage may vary)