This is a picture of Club member Gord Wald’s 5 shot group that he shot at 100 yards on the morning of Saturday August 15th at the Manitoba Provincial Benchrest Championships held in Selkirk Manitoba.
In Bench Rest vernacular, any 5 shot group shot at 100 yards measuring less than .100” center to center of the two bullet holes furthest apart is referred to as a “screamer”.
The 5 shot group need only land within the record box and does not need to be in the center as in Score shooting.
In case you think it’s a scam, there is a moving backer system behind the target which moves a blank sheet of paper at a rate of one inch per minute to verify that 5 shots were indeed fired on the target in the 7 minute time limit.
It looks like you could fire 1 shot on the target and the other 4 into the backstop and claim it was a screamer. But, the Official Scorer checks every target backer paper to verify there are 5 bullet holes, and if there’s not, the shooter is assessed a one inch penalty for each shot not on paper. A one inch penalty is impossible to recover from and will put the competitor to the bottom of ranking for the weekend.
Screamers are a little more common than a hole in one in golf. The current Selkirk Range Record for smallest 100 yard 5 shot group is a .048” shot by Murray Benson of Selkirk on August 18th 2012.
The current Canadian record for smallest 100 yard 5 shot group is .032 shot by Al Mirdoch October 9th, 1982. Gord’s target is signed and dated by the Match Director and will be framed with the backing paper verifying 5 bullets passed through one hole at 100 yards.
Congratulations Gord, well done.
Submitted by Dwayne Cyr