38 American Shooting Journal // August 2019
I had two goals for this match. One
was to make the finale. Just making it
into the top 10 qualifiers would have
been a win to me, just to break history.
The second was to clean the qualifying
run. Last year we only missed one shot
and I know that the course of fire is
cleanable under good conditions.
This year organizers changed
the match up a bit; they made some
target sizes smaller and they changed
how many people qualified for the
finale. This year, the top 20 percent
of competitors were awarded finale
slots, which meant that up to 16One of four targets at the KO2M competition shows just how far
shooters had to reach. Targets begin at 1.5 miles and stretch to
just over 2 miles, though nobody hit the longest this year.competitors would duke it out in
the final run! A lot can change in
those rounds when the point value
of targets is so high. With ranges
starting at 2,614 yards and heavy
multipliers, you’d better be on your
game for the finale!I WAS RANDOMLY picked to run on
day one. My conditions weren’t great
but they weren’t too bad either. Just
enough condition changes to keep you
on your toes. We had a decent run but
not what I wanted.
Organizers put many of us teamshooters very close together and that
put a major rush when our slot was
up to shoot. So my run started with
me running the wrong profile on my
solver. My teammate Tom Manners
was up just before me and I had his
profile still on my phone, so the cold
bore shot was way off! I saw it hit really
low in my scope and quickly milled the
difference to determine how much I
was off. I saw about 2 mils and knew
there was a major issue. Instead of
making a correction on the fly for the
first target, I decided to take the time
to go through my phone to see what IBrantley used handloaded .416-caliber MCS rounds
tipped with 550-grain Cutting Edge bullets, which
travel at a reported 3,100 feet per second once fired.