FEATURE
TAIWAN | ISLAND INSIDER
hours drive away from Taipei, and where many of your favourite
airsoft manufacturers not based in Taipei run their operations.
We arrived in plenty of time for registration and prepared our
equipment and took a look around the competition site alongside
the other teams from Taipei; Spring Rain (SR) - who I had tried a
few sessions with in the past as well as having taken part in their
“ding ding cup” that Belinda had invited me along to, as well -
and Taipei Focus Action Shooting (TFAS) who train in my usual
weekend skirmishing site Action Bunker during the weeknights,
but whose training times conflicted with my work schedule
preventing me training with them previously. All in all thirty odd
competitors from the three teams attended.
There were to be four stages in total shot by each player
throughout the day, with the thirty something competitors being
split into two squads and cycled between each of two stages
operating before the lunch break - with some rearrangement
then occurring during the break to set up the latter two stages to
be shot after lunch, thus enabling best use of the space we had
and only requiring two sets of range officers to run the whole
operation.
With everyone prepared and raring to go, our first briefing
ensued. My squad, number 2, with Spring Rain and SPPT’s
competitors, would shoot stage 2 first, a medium complexity
setup that comprised a right angle triangle with paper and
popper targets totaling 26 required hits behind the barricades on
the outside edges of the shortest sides and with the competitor
starting at the midpoint of the long side and moving within the
bounds of the triangle itself, before proceeding toward the end
target at the right angle opposite the starting point.
This turned out to be my best stage of the day, with a clean
run of 26 shots, no misses 23 of which were A zone hits and
one relatively smooth reload when moving between sides. I was
quite happy with my performance and achieved third place out
of the six competitors in the production division - so very cleanly
done and relatively quick, or at least my accuracy made up for
my lack of speed - a good start, I felt - my philosophy in training
being “Diligentia comes before Celeras” - I’d rather start with the
accuracy and let speed come later!
Next up before lunch we switched with squad 1 and did the
shortest stage of the whole shoot. Stage 3 involved a very small
square starting/boundary box that basically meant the shooter was
nearly stationary throughout the stage - with a barricade directly
in front featuring a cutout section at a medium height to shoot
through, as well as a single paper target to the left outside and
twin poppers to the right outside. A further two poppers, single
paper and finish target being behind the barricade shot through
the cutout.
I struggled a little with being so much taller than your typical
Taiwanese competitor, given the lower positioning of the cutout in
the barricade forcing me to get pretty low - in the stage planning I
even considered dropping to one knee after dealing with the long
range poppers to allow me more comfort in shooting. However,
I decided against this in the end due to the small boundary box
and me worrying about a potential DQ due to my long legs
overstepping the rear if I took a knee.
As it was, I ran it relatively quickly regardless, with a single
magazine of 15 rounds I managed to make 6 misses and hit the
finish plate with my final round, locking the slide rearward and
garnering a round of applause for being so jammy. With that
stage done we broke for lunch and relaxed in the safe area while
some of the team went off to grab lunch for us all - running on
sandwiches, dumplings, chocolate bars and energy drink most of
the day, I worked up a decent appetite for the dinner we would
grab on the drive home at least!
Following lunch, squad 2 went off up to begin planning stage
3 - another relatively short and simple affair, with two start points
to choose from that ran down two paths forming an X with the
two start points at the rear. The finish plate being hidden behind
barricades between the two start points, forcing you to run
rearward to get a shot on it at the end of the stage, as well as
three poppers and two paper targets hidden around various areas
outside of the X-shaped paths.
Choosing the right hand starting point I managed to get a
clean shot on the nearest popper, followed by an immediate clean
shot on the furthest popper at the other end of the X in front of
me. I then had to run there and shoot left around a barricade to
get the close range paper target there, before turning tail (but
not muzzle, of course) to run back towards the other starting
point in order to take shots at the further away paper and popper
(which took an extra shot to down due to a miss), before leaning
around the start point barricade to get shots on the finish. Again,
I shot it relatively cleanly with a very encouraging start but a little
inaccuracy for the longer shots and a little slow compared to the
more seasoned shooters.
www.airsoft-action.online 29