Day two of the Bower Clinic was spent, when shooting my guns, in a mostly fruitless quest to put a group on the 800-yard target with the Black Hills 168-grain load I’d been shooting all along. My spotter gave me good wind calls, but not only did I not hold consistently enough, I compounded that by trying to add my own wind doping to Steve’s calls (Sorry, Steve!). I connected a few times, though!
So on day three, when the instructors asked me what I wanted to accomplish on my last day, I said that I’d like to make some nice groups on a target as I really hadn’t done that yet. Okay, so they declared the 600-yard target as mine alone, and as I was out of the 168-grainers, I opened up a box of the 175-grain Black Hills and started sending ’em….
 
 
Mission accomplished! There are twenty-two shots out of twenty-eight on this target; you’ll see there are several distinct groups with which I’m quite pleased. I’d have no hesitation about taking this gun to Boomershoot. And yes, that’s a factory T/C Encore frame, trigger and barrel. The only addition was a muzzle brake.
(Kinda silly of me to wait ’til the last day to see how the 175-grain load shot, but I’ll chalk that up to the overall excitement of all three days. It was so much fun it could be hard to concentrate at times.)
So that was my personal Bower Clinic Odyssey. IMHO, the Bower Rest System is a fantastic tool for teaching long-range shooting techniques. As Instructor Marc said, the Bower Rest System virtually eliminates vertical stringing, so the shooter can concentrate on everything else. With a good spotter directing you on target, you should also be able to forget about windage and just focus on breathing, trigger control, reticle focus, parallax… well, okay, there are still a lot of variables left to deal with. But eliminating the vertical really helps!
After getting this stuff down, you can graduate off of the bench into the “real world” of field-shooting with a handgun… that’ll be next year for me.
Want a Bower Rest System of your own? Talk to Instructor Marc, he’ll take care of you:
There is a certain zen moment… speaking of perfect shots, I remember when I read a bowling instruction book many years ago, and taught myself to bowl “scientifically”. One time, I felt it as the ball left my hand, that it was a perfect strike, didn’t even have to watch. I could feel it in my fingertips somehow.
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