Country Folks Superstore on Hwy 9 at Spot Rd. in Cumming has a bowling pin shoot the 3rd Monday of each month, starting at 6 p.m.
The cost is $15, and you get several strings of fire.
Each string or stage consists of either 5 or 7 pins to knock off a wooden bench at 30 feet.
When seven pins are used, two of them will be ones were you can only shoot the head or top section of the pin which has been cleanly sawed off to detach it from the main body. The main body is painted black and it is always a no-shoot or hostage target.
so for those pins you need to be able to hit a target that is only 1.5" wide and maybe 3 inches tall .
When a regular pin is your target, you can shoot it anywhere. The pins are placed on the very back edge of the wooden bench, so they will almost always fall off with any hit. But if one remains on the table top but laying on its side, you have the choice to either shoot it more or just take a 3 second penalty added to your finish time.
The body of a bowling pin is pretty big. It looks like it could be represented as an oval about 3 inches wide and 7 inches tall. If you're a decent shot, you should be able to make those body shots with open sights, even if your gun has a less than crisp trigger pull. But when you must shoot just the top section of a pin, it appears that having some type of optic is very helpful. The people who are using red dot equipped .22 LR target pistols with 5-inch barrels were getting the fastest times tonight.
They tell me that the targets have always been placed at 10 yards or 30 feet, however, if that becomes boring they said they might change the distance for upcoming matches.
All types of handguns are all scored equally. No matter whether you use a 45 automatic, a .357 revolver, a .22 pistol. Whether your gun has iron sights, a red dot sight, a micro open-frame red dot, or even a frame-mounted laser or Crimson Trace lasergrips, all of your scores will depend on how fast and how accurately you hit the target, not what weapon you used.
But, since many of the stages require seven hits on 7 individual targets (or parts of a target) your gun had better hold at least eight rounds, and 10 would make a lot more sense. Tonight I saw a couple shooters who needed at least 10 rounds, sometimes 13 or 14, to get all seven targets down.
A good run would involve firing perhaps 8 or 9 shots and having a total time of 10 seconds. That could either be an honest 10 seconds with no penalty or maybe a 7 second shooting time plus a 3- second penalty for leaving one pin laying on its side on the table top.
This was my first time there. I came late, and I did not bring a suitable gun. So I did not shoot today. I just watched and took a couple of pics. I will come back next month.
October 15th.
(It's always the third Monday of the month.)
