First Free Pistol match is in the books (Saturday at DCPA). An up-and-down performance due to continued issues with the rear sight. My first range session was cut short due to a malfunction of the rear sight, and this has unfortunately returned. My repair fell short in two areas: I reassembled the sight with the clip on the wrong side of the screw, and there is a part missing. I have another pistol with a Pardini rear sight, and a quick side-by-side comparison made it clear what was happening. There are supposed to be two clips, and I have only one. The sight doesn't "click" when adjusted due to the missing part, and will not hold its zero correctly.

Of course, the problem cropped up during the sight-in portion of the match, with five minutes to go! I quickly reassembled the rear sight, and only "wasted" three shots on my first competition target before tweaking the sight back to zero (got lucky, gave it a half-turn of elevation, and a quarter turn of windage base on the first three shots, and was right on the money).

My second series was a good-new, bad-news scenario. The good news, 9 beautifully centered shots. The bad news, a flyer out in the three ring! Still, I was encouraged (more like on cloud nine) by following the first series (79) with an 89 (that's 11 points down for 10 shots, nothing special, but I lost seven of those with the one flyer - drat!) given the issues with the sights.

My repair didn't hold, and it unfortunately didn't become clear to me what was going on until after the match, when I had a chance to pull my target centers and look at all of them side-by-side. The sight was slowly raising the point of impact down range. Thinking it was me, I started trying to compensate for mistakes I wasn't actually making, which only compounded the issue. My scores steadily fell for the last four series, from a high of 89 to a low of 57. Match score was a 433/600 or 72%. A repeat of that performance will put me in the Marksman ranks, where you'd think I would be comfortable. One of these days, I am going to shoot a match without firearm or ammunition issues, and I'll be one happy dude.

Moral of the story - trust your shot calling!! A lesson learned and, hopefully, not to be forgotten. This also reinforces the importance of preparation. I think that it is impossible to perform at your highest level without confidence in your equipment, and confidence is built through proper preparation.

So, how to remedy this situation? I've shot a note to Larry Carter (www.larrysguns.com) explaining the situation with an accompanying photo of the "good" sight. With any luck, he has the proper parts or another sight. Last ditch, I can see if the sight on my .22 (a Pardini sight) will fit on the PGP-75; it seems that they are attached to the firearm with a single pin in the same fashion. Next match is May 26th, I am looking forward to a better performance with a better prepared firearm (and shooter!).