Whoa! That’s right, I’m back! You might be asking yourself where I went. Some times I ask myself the same thing. It absolutely blew my mind how many people messaged me, how many questions I got while I was gone, and the love people sent my way. I am blown away. With that said, I owe you guys an explanation.
Work… My job is demanding and everything else fell by the wayside. I have put in more hours this year than I ever have. It has been insane. Fortunately and unfortunately, these long hours seem to be coming to an end. What does this mean? More time to do things and less money to do them. There is always a trade off.
Being busy as hell doesn’t mean that I didn’t do anything blog related. I put in a lot of time shooting. I’m right around 6000 rounds just this summer. I put a lot of my gear to the test, broke some stuff, did some training, and had a whole lot of fun.
I’ll keep this to the highlights rather than go into full on story time.
Lots of Practice…
Shooting is a very perishable skill. If you don’t use it, then you lose it. That was a huge motivator to get out and do much more shooting this summer. Not only that, but I had gear that I needed to put through its paces. You need to use your gear to know what actually works for you. Practicing and training will show you where your gear stands. With that said, I also had to put gear and guns through their paces for the blog as well.
Up until we got shut down due to the fire danger, I spent quite a bit of time shooting both by myself and with my like minded friends. Its important to shoot with like minded people. This will help you stay more focused and complete your goals. Goals are incredibly important. Without goals it becomes easy to throw money out the window and not improve the skills you want to work on. With that said, its also important to enjoy yourself and have fun while you’re out there.
While practice is incredibly important to improving skills, its not training. You can watch as many Youtube videos as you want, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. Its important to get good reps in and you cant do that if you don’t know how to do something properly. Hence why being trained/educated by a professional is so important. I had planned on training this summer, but it didn’t happen the way I planned.
The Goon Operational Group…
This summer I had planned on going back to Idaho and continuing my training with Runenation. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. It didn’t slow me down though. In a round about way, I ended up having a friend over for dinner and that lead to more training. He told me that is friend was doing some training in Idaho and that I should sign up.
I didn’t hesitate to sign up. The training was hosted by Goon Operational Group. I had never heard of them. They’re based out of Idaho and are currently hosting training there as well as planning training in other locations in the PNW. They’re about 3 hours away from me. Its kind of nice as training else where usually means driving farther. On top of that, their prices were incredibly affordable.
I ended up driving over to Idaho a bit early and met up with the GOG guys. They welcomed me with open arms. GOG is a group of guys dedicated to being better human beings. They train hard, but they strive to make those around them better too. They are bringing training to a region where good relevant training is hard to come by and are creating a community of like minded people. These guys are freaking awesome.
I’ll definitely be training more with them. You’ll be hearing more about GOG in the future. If you’re in the S.E. WA, ID, N.E. OR, or any where close and want to train, then you should definitely hit up GOG.
Intergalactic Operator
While I was in Idaho with GOG for training, they were hosting Intergalactic Operator. I had no idea who Jayson was at the time. I’d soon come to find out that he is a damn cool guy who is really down to Earth. I came into this whole ordeal not knowing what to expect, but I figured I’d get some good training in. Good training is an understatement and I walked way with much more than just training.
We started our day off shooting pistol. Shooting pistol is something that I did not typically enjoy, but Jayson was able to get me dialed in. At the end of the pistol portion of his class I had began to enjoy it and was shooting better than I had ever shot before. His method of teaching was something that really resonated with me. He has a lot of good information that comes out in a sort of “class room” time.
One of the other things I noticed is that he never let a good question go to waste. Granted, there are no stupid questions. He used questions as a learning opportunity for the class when ever possible. I greatly appreciated that as I felt that it added so much more to what was already a well thought out and incredibly thorough class. Jayson certainly knows his stuff and it shows. My shooting improved vastly in just the first day of training. He just has this way of making things click.
After the class I ended up asking Jayson if he’d do a private class for my girlfriend. Fast forward a bit and he came into town for a private class. He did for my girlfriend what he did for me. She walked away much more confident and a way more competent shooter. In two days they went over both pistol and rifle. It was cool as hell to get the opportunity to hang out with and get to know Jayson as well. I’m honored to be able to call him a friend and I greatly appreciate him taking the time to come out and train my girlfriend.
Nods and Lasers and Cans… Oh My!
Shooting under nods had been something that I had been wanting to do ever since I got a PVS-14 and an IR laser. The only issue for me had been waiting on my suppressor to get out of NFA jail. It finally made it out of jail, but not before all our shooting spots got closed down due to the fire danger. My friend, Whiterhyno692000 (the guy that did the chopped and Mlok KAC grip for the Super Dissy), had been telling me that I need to come down and do some night shooting for about a year now. Since he had access to a place where we could safely do it, we took him up on that offer.
We made the 2 hour trip out his way. I have to say, heading out toward the Cascades immediately reminded me of how much I miss real trees. Once we got out there and got setup, we ran our guns a little bit in the day light. It didn’t take long before it was dark enough to use the nods though. I had used my PVS14 a little bit in the backyard, but never very extensively. Needless to say, it was a very eye opening experience.
People often have this misconception that night vision is similar to what you see in video games. I know better than that, but I will say that it is pretty weird. It made shooting with my IR laser almost video game like. It was easy and really fast. On the other hand every thing else was noticeably harder. Moving with any speed can be disorienting. Depth perception can be a challenge. Reloading can be an issue. Essentially you have to do a lot of tasks by feel and muscle memory because you cant see anything up close.
It was a great experience. I really hope that I get to do more night shooting soon. Its an area that I need to seek out training in and something that I’ll definitely be covering as I get more experience in it.
Gear and such…
Through out this summer I had the chance to play with a lot of gear. Some of which I’m going to touch on later. Both training and practicing in general have prompted me to change up my gear as well. I’ll touch on some things in detail later, but here are the highlights.
I’ve been running a Spiritus LV-119 Covert almost since they first came out. Long before they had an Overt option. Basically before all the airsofters and the pandemic/rioting made their gear unobtainium. I had been running a Haley D3CRM as a placard and it served its purpose reasonably well. I also slapped some new Shellback Tactical level IV Prevail 7.2lb plates in it. Its a setup that has worked and been incredibly comfortable for me. Well, that is until I decided to try a few things. I’ll cover all this later.
Earlier I mentioned that Jayson’s class had helped me really start to enjoy shooting handgun. Well, I’ve got some things I’m going to be changing up in the handgun realm. First of which will be my holster situation because I’m running more than just my Glock 19 now. With that said, I’ve got a few handguns that I will also be touching on. I’ll also be changing things up on the belt front since my BFG dump pouch did not survive the GOG/Intergalactic Operator course.
The other major piece of gear that I will be getting into is communications. I’m new to that world, so if you keep up with the blog, then we’ll be learning together. Comms seemed simple, but once I started digging into it I learned that there’s a lot to it. It is an area where you can get yourself into trouble if you’re not careful. There is a legal and not so legal way to go about the use of comms.
Did I also mention that I got a can? Yup… We’ll talk about those too.
In Conclusion….
Those are the highlights. I know I could elaborate a substantial amount more on many things. In fact, there are things that deserve their own posts. This really doesn’t do justice to those. This was just the summer cliff notes. There is definitely a lot of new stuff coming and a bit of following up on other things like the Super Dissy. I still have top secret projects as well…
So you’ll just have to stay tuned and see what craziness comes up.
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