How Much Ammo?

A pretty common question is how many rounds will be needed to fire the Canadian Championships.  You can refer to daily match schedule on page 8 of the most recent Marksman (or see here), remembering to add two sighters for each range fired.


The first two days, First-Friday-13-Aug and First-Saturday-14-Aug are our warmup days.  Your ammo use will depend on which ones you sign up for:

• Sierra Canadian Long Range Challenge - 68 rounds total (including sighters).
• Ottawa Regiment - 17 rounds
• Gooderham - 29 rounds
• Army and Navy Veterans - 17 rounds
• Squadded Practice - up to you!

Then the Tilton match and the Grand Agg happen, running from Sunday-15-Aug to Thursday-19-Aug-AM, plus 2nd-Friday-20-Aug-AM.  This requires 228 rounds (190 + 38 sighters).

Your entry fee in the Grand also entitles you to shoot the Governor General's Final or the F-Class Final if you qualify; this is another 34 rounds.

The team matches happen on Thursday-19-Aug-PM (34 rounds per shooter), 2nd-Friday-20-Aug-PM (24 rounds per shooter), and 2nd-Saturday-21-Aug-AM (36 rounds per shooter).

If you are not shooting the team matches or helping with them, you might want to shoot the "extras" matches - Thu-PM Perry (51 rounds), 2nd-Fri-PM Hayhurst (36 rounds), 2nd-Sat-AM Street (51 rounds).

For shooters firing the America Match, 68 rounds are needed there.

It of course never hurts to bring extra ammo if you can - for shootoffs, or perhaps to loan your rifle and ammo to a teammate in a team match, etc.

Proposed changes to 2010 Canadian Championships

(originally posted 8-Nov-2009; last updated 11-|Feb-2010) These are my thoughts on the changes I am considering for the 2010 Canadian Championships. Please let me know your thoughts on my ideas, or feel free to make suggestions of your own!

• (update 11-Feb-2010) Host 2010 America Match, Sunday 22-Aug-2010, consisting of national national teams of 8 TR shooters.  Also offer America Match Alongside F-Class, with teams of 8 shooters (4 F-Open plus 4 F-TR).  The Alongside Vets TR team match has been cancelled due to lack of entries.
• (update 11-Feb-2010) Offer squadded practice during Warmups period (1st Fri and 1st Sat) ("training camp in drag"?)
• (update 8-Dec-2009 - cancellation confirmed) Cancel 300m ISSF-style match; move Sierra sponsorship to Long Range Challenge
• (update 11-Feb-2010) F-TR and F-Farky - will be offered as one merged class, to be called "F/F"
• (update 11-Feb-2010) The Black Powder Programme has been re-introduced in 2010.  Please see DCRA web page for details and entry form.
• (update 11-Feb-2010) Canadian 223/556 Championship will be kept in 2010.
• Return Commonwealth Match to 12-shooter format

F-TR and F-Farky in 2010 - where do we go?

(update 11-Feb-2010) For 2010 it has been decided to "merge" F-TR and F-Farquharson, using the more lenient of the two rules, to be offered as "F/F" (i.e.  .223 or .308, any bullet weight, and any means of front support as per F/Open)

In our present rulebook we have two very similar versions of F-Class that are fired with .223/.308 rifles. There are only two differences between F/Farky and F-TR, and while they are so minor that it is not really meaningful to offer both classes, it has not yet been possuble to fully merge the definitions of F/F and F/TR at the international level (ICFRA rules and competitions). I would like to see us resolve this issue for Canadian F-Class shooting, and offer only one ".223/.308" kind of F-Class shooting for next year.

Our F/Farquharson class permits any form of front rest to be used, including benchrest-style pedestal front rests, and also limits bullet weights to the same limits as TR rifles (which is, presently, 155 max for .308, and no bullet weight limit for .223). The official ICFRA F/Restricted class, which has since renamed to "F-TR", only permits bipods to be used as a front rest, and allows bullets of any weight to be used, for both .308 and .223. Interestingly, the vast majority of the F/Restricted shooters at the 2009 F Class World Championships in Bisley used .308/155.

If we strictly adopt the ICFRA F-TR version as our one and only kind of .223/.308 F-Class shooting, there will be a number of Canadian shooters who will have to either change to using a bipod or to no longer fire ".223/.308 F-Class" at our Canadian Championships. It is the opinion of most Canadian shooters that a pedestal front rest does not provide any significant competitive advantage over a bipod, especially since in modern F-Class parlance a "bipod" can be a pretty sophisticated piece of gear. And this is reflected in our F-Farky rules of many years standing, in which we permit any form of front rest to be used.

If we stick with our F/Farky version, we might lose potential entries from competitors who wish to shoot with equipment legal for use at the FCWC 2013 matches - these could be visiting American or British F-TR teams, or it could be our own Canadian F-TR team, should any of them wish to explore the use of bullets heavier than 155 grains for their F-TR rifles.

The best proposal I have heard yet, is that we basically merge the two classes, using the least restrictive definitions of each. Perhaps we would want to call the result "F-Farky", or perhaps we would call it "F-TR(Canadian)", but the essentials would be that any form of front rest would be permitted, and that any.223 or .308 bullet weight would be permitted. In this class, any existing F-TR or F-Farquharson rifle would be legal. If there is something bad to be said about this proposal, it would be that we are departing from the standard ICFRA practice, which might bring into question either our dedication to eventually adopting ICFRA rules for our own shooting, or perhaps whether our trial of ICFRA rules is in fact a meaningful trial of ICFRA rules after all, since we keep every-so-slightly tweaking ICFRA rules slightly to better suit our domestic desires.

Offer Squadded Practice Adding Coaching to Warmup Matches?

(edited 8-Dec-2009) - In response to feedback received, it seems that the existing Warmup matches should best be left alone as individual matches.  In order to support individual and team training opportunities, I propose that DCRA sell timeslots on particular targets, which can be bought ahead of time and also at the matches. I am thinking that the morning's shooting (0800-1130) and the afternoon's shooting (1300-1700) would be parcelled into 30-minute blocks. Pricing hasn't been finalized yet, but I am thinking that $20 per block might fit into the scheme of things (it would cover the DCRA's staff costs, and it would be cheaper that the warmup matches which have additional costs and benefits due to prizes being offered).


I anticipate that the available ranges for squadded practice would be: Fri AM - 300m (and perhaps 900m too);  Fri. PM, 900m; Sat. AM 500y and 900m; Sat PM 900m.  I would like to see a grid of available times and distances included on our entry form, which would allow people or teams to request particular timeslots ahead of time, and reduce some of the last-minute crunch associated with registration and shooting the first couple of days.

For a team to buy all seven timeslots for a morning's shooting, for two adjacent targets, would be $280, and to buy all eight timeslots on two targets for an afternoon's shooting would be $320. So for $600, on Friday a team could spend all morning at 300m on two targets of their own, and the entire afternoon on "their" two targets at 900m. The afternoon's 900m time could be particularly useful, since on most days it would likely include a couple of hours of pretty challenging winds (certainly 1300-1530 are usually 'worthy' conditions at Connaught), and also at least an hour of fairly mild wind conditions at the end (might be useful to verify that peoples' gear is performing well at 900m). It would seem to me that a couple of dedicated targets could provide a whole lot of shooting opportunity for a squad of 10 people, so for $60 per person you could build yourself a customized "training camp" day.


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(edited 3-Nov-2009) Original proposal - "Adding Coaching to Warmup Matches?"

Prior to our Grand Aggregate starting on the afternoon of First Sunday, we hold two and a half days of Warmups. The Warmups serve a number of important functions, some of them being getting newly hired butts markers and range line staff up to speed, providing elevation zeroes for shooters, allowing shooters for whom Connaught is not their home range to get a good feel for the range prior to the Grand, and also as worthwhile matches in and of themselves.

A common complaint about our fullbore shooting programme, nationally and provincially, is that we don't get nearly enough opportunities to shoot in team matches under coaching. And we seem to get even less opportunity to shoot under coached practice. Yet the most prestigious international matches that we fire, both F-Class and TR, are team shooting events, which the Brits seem genetically predispositioned to win. Of course it's not genetic, but it is almost certainly helped by the fact that the Brits do a lot of shooting under coached team conditions.

I therefore propose that some of our Warmup Matches be modified so as to permit the shooters to be coached. By this I mean that a shooter would be allowed to fire his score individually (in the usual way), but if he wished to fire under the direction of the coach, he would be permitted to do so and his score would be accepted. Some feedback already received has indicated that perhaps shooters firing the warmup matches individually might find this to be unfair, so perhaps we should offer a prizelist that recognizes both individually-fired scores as well as coached scores (and perhaps the most meaningful way would be to have the coached scores be counted as teams of four or eight shooters).

What I would like to see happen is that groups of shooters, including but definitely not limited to national teams, would set up coaches and plotters on one or more targets, and then run through a succession of shooters. Multi-target collaboration amongst the coaches would be permitted.

If we use standard ICFRA team match timings (1m15s per shot), then over the course of a three-hour morning or afternoon time block there would be time for about eight shooters to fire on each target. So if a Palma Training Squad wanted to staff up four targets, they could have those four coaches assess 32 shooters. Or if a visiting team were sized to fire the 12-shooter Commonwealth Match (e.g. the German or GBRT team), they could set up their official team on three targets and they could have every one of their shooters fire twice.

In a sense this wouldn't be a "real team event" because I am suggesting that only individual scores be counted. This is partly to allow and encourage a shooter on his own to still go ahead and shoot the match, but it's also a deliberate effort to encourage the teams to treat this as much as a training exercise than as a match in and of itself.

Two major reasons (from the shooter's point of view) for Warmups is to get elevation and windage zeroes, and to also get a refresher course in reading Connaught's winds. Participating in a team shoot, as a shooter and as a coach or plotter, ought to fully provide this important warmup function.

In another posting I am proposing to delete 1st-Fri-AM's Sierra 300m ISSF match. I propose to replace Friday AM's firing with an as-yet-unnamed match, consisting of 2ss15 @ 300m and 2ss10 @ 900m

My preliminary proposal at this point is to:

• Maintain as an individual match the Ottawa Regiment (2ss15 @ 800m 1st-Friday evening)
  
• Maintain as an individual match the Army and Navy Veterans Match (2ss15 @ 900m 1st-Sat afternoon)
• Amend to be "Coaching Permitted" the as-yet-unnamed-match (Fri-AM 2ss15@300m + 2ss10@900m)
• Amend to be "Coaching Permitted" the Long Range Challenge I (Fri-PM 2ss15 @ 900m plus another 2ss15 @ 900m)
• Amend to be "Coaching Permitted" the Gooderham (Sat-AM 2ss15 @ 500y plus 2ss10 @ 900m)
  
• Amend to be "Coaching Permitted" the Long Range Challenge II (Fri-PM 2ss15 @ 900m plus another 2ss15 @ 900m)

Match and aggregate-wise, I suggest this:

• Each "Coaching Permitted" match would maintain its present structure w.r.t. declaring individual match winners. The only change here is that some shooters may have turned in their score under the influence of a coach.
• We could add concurrent team (perhaps 4-shooter?) aggs for each of these matches.
  
• We could also add a concurrent team agg (8 shooters? 12 shooters?) for the agg of all of these matches

ISSF-style 300m shooting at DCRA

(edited 8-Dec-2009)  It looks like we have confirmed at the DCRA Executive meeting this past weekend that we will not be offering the 300m ISSF-style match in 2010.

(edited 3-Nov-2009)
As things stand, it looks to me as if the ISSF match is "broken". I think it's a good match, I love the challenge of shooting on such a demanding target, it's nice to shoot something with a common link to our SFC brethren, in fact I think it's a good idea all-around. But the "customers" are telling us that they aren't interested, and year after year they have stayed away in droves from this nice match. While 2009's attendance was probably unusually low because it was a two-day event that was used to select a Canadian team to the 300m CSFC match in India, the event's attendance hasn't been any more than about 20 shooters for the past number of years.

There are many good reasons for a shooter at the Canadian Championships to *not* shoot the ISSF match. It's one of our more expensive matches to run, and the entry fees reflect this. It is quite demanding of a shooter's mental and physical resources, which deters a number of shooters from starting ten days of shooting by firing seventy-plus shots in a single sitting.

I propose that DCRA not offer an ISSF-style 300m match in 2010, and to basically "retire" it from our shooting programme. We'd only re-introduce it in the future if someone wishes to step forward with a proposal to run the match in some way that would draw enough shooters to make the exercise worthwhile. In its place in the shooting schedule (1st Friday morning) we would hold other kinds of warmup matches at 300m on "D" range, on standard DCRA targets, without a shelter tent being set up.

There are some complications with retiring our 300m ISSF-style shooting. One big one is that Sierra has generously sponsored the match (its official name has been the "Sierra Canadian 300m National ISSF Championship") with a prize list of several thousand bullets, and has also sponsored similar provincial-level matches to go along with it (with many more thousands of bullets for prizes). The provincial "Sierra 300m Championships" matches have been very popular, and I suggest that they definitely *not* be cancelled.

I suggest that Sierra's sponsorship for the Canadian Championships be moved to some other significant match that we fire. One possibility would be to assign the Sierra sponsorship and also the bullet prizes to our "Short Range Agg" (all 300m firing during our Grand Agg). Another would be to assign it to our Long Range Challenge Match. Yet another would be to assign it to the (proposed) coached Warmups (see elsewhere for details) in some manner.

I'm interested in hearing feedback on all of the following:

-- My initial thoughts are that we should move the Sierra sponsorships and prizes to the Long Range Challenge, and/or to our coached Warmups. I will contact Sierra and see if they are interested in continuing their sponsorship, and what their preferences might be. If they choose the LR Challenge, it ought to be renamed to be something like the "Sierra Canadian Long Range Challenge (or Championships, etc)". Or if they'd like to support coached shooting development and training perhaps they would rather sponsor the all-new "Sierra Canadian Coached Fullbore Shooting Clinc"?

-- Prizes could be allocated to the winner (or the top two or three places) of each class with sufficient entries (TR-Master, TR-Expert, TR-Sharpshooter/Greenshot, F-Open, F-TR).

-- I will further suggest that we eliminate the cash prizes from the Long Range Challenge - at present, $25 of the LRC's $120 entry fees go toward funding a cash prize pool. It is my thought that it would be better to have fees at $95 and have no cash prizes, but lots of bullet prizes. I'd really appreciate hearing some of your thoughts on this though...

2009 DCRA Rule Book now available

The 2009 Rules are now available. The DCRA Office will have printed copies for sale ($10) for the Canadian Championships, or you may freely access them online here (185 page, 1.6M .pdf file).

The 2009 rules are adopted from ICFRA TR and F-Class rules, with our previous DCRA rulebook covering items omitted from the ICFRA rules (for example, relay timings, team eligibility criteria, shooter classification system, etc. You will notice that the rule book has three sections.

Section 1 applies to TR. In the few places where we have amended the ICFRA rules for our use (mainly Message 6, targets, and bolt-out rule), the changes are clearly indicated with changebars and strikeouts. It should be quite clear what our rules are, and what the ICFRA rules are (e.g. which will apply to the 2011 WLRC).

Section 2 applies to F-Class; it's our amended version of the ICFRA F-Class rules.

And finally, Section 3 is our "old" DCRA rulebook.

Shorter/Faster/Better/Cheaper....?

That the Canadian Championships "cost too much", and that they are also "too long", is a completely fair point, and was made a number of times in the survey conducted by the DCRA last fall. I make those points to myself every year, and I wish it were shorter and cheaper. Having said that, I enjoy the whole nine days every year, and they finish far too quickly. But it really seems to be an enormous luxury of time and money (in some ways this is a bug, in some ways it is a feature)

We're not going to change the 2009 Canadian Championships, but perhaps in future years we could do things differently?

In this post, I'll try to lay out the considerations involved, and open up the discussion of what we might be able to do better. Please write your thoughts/questions/ideas in the "Comments" section (or you can communicate them privately to me at dmc@danielchisholm.com).

The reason we haven't made the matches shorter and/or cheaper yet, is that we haven't figured out how to do it. But if anyone has the desire to talk about ways that we could make the matches shorter and/or cheaper, we should go ahead and do that. A fair warning though, once you get started at it, it ends up being more difficult than you might think at first.

If you're up to it, we can have a go at trying to figure it out. This will initially take some effort to get to first understand the problem and its constraints, and only then might we be able to make any real progress on it.

By my reckoning, here are some of the factors that should be taken into account while trying to figure out a better format for the matches:

- the number of ordinary work days that need to be taken off
- the total number of days of shooting while in Ottawa
- travel day(s) to and from Ottawa
- how many days for the Grand Agg, and on which days
- Gov. General's match
- when and where do the team matches fit in amongst the Grand/Gov's time period
- the warmup, and "extra" matches (e.g. ISSF) that we have at the beginning
- how our matches satisfy and fit with the cadets shooting needs
- some "near" shooters (e.g. Ontario) who don't attend, suggest that a 3-4 match might be more attendable
- some "far" shooters (Prairies, BC) who do attend, say that if the matches were made shorter, they would not attend, because it would make the very large costs of getting to and from Ottawa no longer worthwhile
- some "far" shooters say that they can't attend the matches as they are because they are too long