We went shooting today. We took our Eric’s M1 and the spotting scopes, drove to the desert, set the steel target up and expected to have some fun seeing how far out we could touch. Here is something you need to understand, to understand why our day did not turn out as we had planned. It is a little thing called a wind call. You use it on long range shots to compensate for windage in your shot. Now for instance let us say that your target is 500 meters and the wind is blowing 4 miles an hour. you simply add a decimal to the front of your distance, so 500 becomes .5. Now you take what ever the speed of the wind is and you divide it by 4. so in this case it would be 4 divided by 4, which gives you one. then you take that number, which in this example is 1, and then multiply it by the decimal, which would be .5 multiplied by 1 giving you .5. that is how far, in mils, to the left or the right of the target that you must hold. When i say hold to the left or the right I mean that when you are looking through your optic that is how many dots or lines(depending on your optic) to the left or the right you have to aim to actually hit the target.. The problem with today is that we ran into 34 mph winds with a target set up at 656 meters.
Here is where things got out of fucking hand. you divide 34 by 4 which gives you 8.5. you then take 8.5 and multiply it by .6 giving you 5.95. Then you have to compensate for that extra 50 meters using your good old gut instinct. This was putting our wind calls at 6.5 mils off to the left of the target. Now your thinking that doesn’t sound that bad but here is what you have to understand. one mil is 6 inches. This means that we were aiming 13 feet to the left of the target and we have not even began to factor in elevation.
BUT, we did hit. Not as accurately as we normally do, but we hit. We brought out so much ammo because the weather report called winds peeking at 5-10 mph. We thought we would be attempting shots at 950m or even 1,000m and then life bitch slapped us with gusting winds of 34-38mphs. Go fuck yourself mother nature. So we called it early. But it was still nice to get to go out and shoot with him one last time before he deploys.
