The Bucket Challenge

Some of our brave participants

It's been a long snowy winter and opportunities to enjoy the shooting sports are limited by access to ranges and to how far targets can be placed.

A couple Sundays ago we were having dinner at our place in Posen, Michigan, and all "the boys" started talking about going shooting (Denise and Maria basically tolerate "the boys" and don't engage in trivial games like shooting.)

Of course I had to say that just shooting to make noise was not enough and that we should have a challenge of some kind. That is when I remembered of shooting paint cans at around 200 meters when I got my first twenty-two rifle at a rather late age a long time ago, in a far away galaxy!

So I proposed "The Bucket Challenge." Rules are very simple: use a five-gallon plastic bucket, place it around 200 yards away, shoot 20 rounds and see who has the most impacts. Initially CGD was against destroying perfectly good buckets just for fun, but then I pointed out that we were just "ventilating" the buckets so they could be use to grow mushrooms or other vegetables once spring set in. No objections after that.

On Monday morning we all went to "The Rock" on US-23, and MAL even went to the extreme of painting our first name initial on each of the five buckets! We decided that in order to be fair we would all shoot the same rifle and same ammo.

Soon we found out that the main challenge was understanding holdover or bullet drop and windage, and of course since I had the idea I was almost unanimously elected to be the first shooter. After many misses we established that holdover was between 36 and 48 inches (3 to 4 feet!) and windage on that particular day was about 8 inches or half a bucket.

To make a long story short everyone was able to hit the bucket. Lowest hit count (out of 20 shots) was nine and highest thirteen. All shots were from a bench, using a front rest and a sand bag for the stock.

We will soon be back for another Bucket Challenge, maybe with each sportsman shooting its own rifle and ammunition or moving to the "Next Level Bucket Challenge" and shooting off hand!

Please, go for the comments below and let us know about your own shooting challenge.