I have had a hand in spotting several people to victory at Lodi matches, those are the good times. I have also come out of the scope knowing I should have done better for my shooter, those are the worst times. Spotting is hard work, much harder than shooting or pulling targets. I am not a great spotter, I am sometimes a good spotter. A great spotter has to have balls of titanium! If you don't have the balls to give the really hard to call sight corrections you aren't giving your shooter the service he needs to do his best.
Spotting for Bob at 1000 yards Sunday morning we got centered up good and I had the windage dialed, but the verticals were kicking everybody and I knew that. Bob and I both felt we were ready for his record string so we went for it. Then the worst of all things happened on the first record shot and that dang tailwind caught us completely by surprise, miss low center! I felt like the worse spotter ever! We looked at each and talked it through, what had just happened. This was my first time shooting with Bob though we've know each other from 20 years. Bob is a pretty unflappable guy and can take a gut punch like that first shot and just keep moving forward. So we moved on, but it stuck in the back of my mind that I had cost him points.
Toward the end of his 900 yard string something I could see for a while was coming finally reared it's ugly head, the conditions reversed. I could see hints that it wanted to switch in the previous shots and we were struggling trying to hold on to the black as a result of the flutter that came and went quickly in the mirage. Now with the reversal we waited. The reversal held, we waited. We waited as long as we could and Bob said we're going to have to make a correction and go. Well, I was spotting so the decision of how much was on me. I wanted to give him 3-4 minutes left, but that miss at 1000 weighed on me as did the shots we had already had at 900 out near the edges at 3 and 9 o'clock. I just couldn't find the courage to go that much, so I wimped out and gave him a measly 2 minutes left. Bang, it came up a 6 just out side the 7-ring at 3 o'clock. 2 minutes more correction and he would have had a 9 and maybe a 10. No balls no glory!
Lesson relearned: To be a good spotter or shooter you have to be able to totally blow off the last shot, the only shot that matters is the next one!
And I know that, but it's hard to live by that when it's going on a friends score.
DT