2.7
Silhouette
Registration and Certification You will need to register the competitors, check their classification books to see if the class shown still agrees with advance entry, certify the firearms, and squad the shooters.
Chicken, Pigs, Turkeys, and Rams; the Silhouette targets
If your scales and trigger weights are located next to the registration desk, you can have the certifying official initial the shooter’s score card. You will collect classification books at this time and sell new books to those competitors who do not have books for the current year. Squadding Silhouette shooting is popular internationally in countries such as Mexico and South Africa
There are two basic methods of squadding the shooters for sequence of firing. In relay firing, if there is only one set of each animal (one “bay”), a relay would consist of four shooters, one firing on each type of target. Each shooter on the first relay will customarily shoot ten shots (one bank of five animals two times), and then make room for the second relay of shooters. When the first comes up again, each shooter will move to the next type of target in this order: chicken, pig, turkey, ram. The shooter who fired first on turkey will shoot next on ram, the shooter who started on ram will move to chicken, etc. This system, which is generally used in rifle silhouette tournaments, is easy to operate because it lets you assign a shooter to act as scorer for the relay ahead. Use of this system also ensures that each shooter will compete under similar conditions of light and weather. In the other method of squadding, each shooter is assigned a starting time to fire on chickens. When ten shots have been fired at chickens, the competitor proceeds directly to pigs and the next shooters starts chickens. In this manner, the shooter completes the 40-shot course interrupted only by the delay required to reset the targets and to move from each bank of targets to the next. The straight-through method of squadding just described is used most in Long Range and Smallbore Pistol competition. In Long Range Pistol, there are often up to six events being fired concurrently. Straight-through squadding allows you to assign competitors a starting time for each event that will permit the competitor to finish each event and have a short break before being on line for the next relay. The use of straight-through squadding makes it difficult to assign shooters as scorekeepers, and makes it likely that competitors in the same event will shoot under dissimilar conditions. If shooters are to be permitted to shoot for “long run” records, it is generally best to save this for the end of the shooting day and take care of it just before or after the shootoffs of ties. Target Setting An inescapable chore of any silhouette tournament is setting targets. Improper target setting can be the source of annoying delays. The ideal solution for High Power Rifle Silhouette, Long Range Pistol, and Black Powder Cartridge Rifle is to install protected pits or bunkers for target setters at each target line. You must have a positive means of signaling between the line and the bunkers
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Chapter 2
Tournament Operations Guide