Bower Clinic Odyssey, Part One

As I’ve mentioned, at the start of the Bower Clinic, I had never fired any specialty pistol, including my own recently-acquired pair in .308 Winchester. But over three days, the instructors helped me improve a lot, as you’ll see from the pics below:

On the first day, after lunch, this was me at 500 yards. Most of my shots were in the lower right of the plate. You can see from my grin I was happy to be even connecting at that range.

 

Here’s a second-shot connection at 600 yards, which made me quite happy.

I was using the Encore I’d zeroed at 200 yards off the Harris bipod, and was simply holding high using the Burris Ballistic Plex reticle. This worked just fine, except that human error crept in quite a bit due to the fact that I was having to hold based on fractions of the distance between stadia lines in the reticle. Turns out you can be very precise with this system, but it was my first time, so I wasn’t. 

Anyway, after we went out to paint the targets, I was eager to try out the Bower Rest System on my other Encore. Feeling full of myself, I said “let’s zero this one at 600 yards.” Foolishly, I’d put too much elevation in the Burris Signature rings at home, so it took some fiddling to get on target. But once I’d done so, I was whooping just like Slim:

So now, at the end of the first day  mind you, it was time to go for the angle iron at 660 yards. Yes, that’s my Diablo Valley Gun Works baseball cap perched at the top for scale.

 …I’m a happy boy!