SIAS Update, June 2023
by Cheryl Henley, SIAS Director
Despite our first Match of the season, scheduled for March 5th, being cancelled, the SIAS season has continued full steam ahead!
It’s rare that we cancel a Match, but with a snow report of 5 inches on the ground at the MP Range and the road up having limited accessibility, with more snow in the forecast, we made the difficult decision to upset the 84 shooters registered to come out and “knock the rust off” and cancelled our first Match of the season, definitely a first for me as Director, and as a shooter with SIAS since 2013!
Our sport is based on accuracy and speed; the faster you run through a Stage, the better your score is likely to be. It is literally a “points per second” game, we don’t have the luxury of shooting from an undercover, static position. Choosing to not have people running around with loaded handguns on ice and snow was most certainly the correct, if disappointing, decision. I would include pictures of the many disappointed shooters, but it would take up the whole article!
The next Match we hosted was the first Independent Shooters League match on March 19th, which saw 73 people come out for what turned out to be, the first Action Pistol match of the year.
Since then we have put on two SIAS matches in April and May which saw 74 and 77 people come out to compete. Despite Bill C-21, interest in our Sport continues to grow!
We hosted the third ISL match of the season on May 21st, with 53 competitors in attendance. The weather was perfect, right up until the hurricane force winds hit in the afternoon, blowing over many props, multiple times, which caused a huge number of reshoots, this slowed everything down considerably, and made for a very long day.
Most of our issues were caused by our barricades being blown over, due to the type of netting we currently use. We are looking to switch to a type of netting that will have less wind resistance, so if anyone has a lead on a good price for 1×1 inch plastic netting please email us at: sias@vfgpa.org
We continue to hold SIAS Range Safety Courses as often as we can. We have had 3 so far this season, resulting in 17 enthusiastic new SIAS shooters. The next SIAS Range Safety Course is scheduled for June 24th, sign up is at the Range office.
Our next SIAS Match will be on June 25th.
We are also getting ready to host IPSCBC Qualifiers on July 8th and 9th. Each day will see the Multi Purpose range overrun by 126+ of the best Action Pistol Shooters in the Province, as they test their skills of accuracy and speed, on 7 different Courses of Fire. Spectators are welcome!
One last point: Thanks for getting the word out from our last newsletter article for someone to provide lunch for these Matches. We have engaged Callum, of Digable Roots, to provide lunch for our hungry shooters!
