Pressure Cooker - My First NRL Hunter 

Shooting rifles is fun. Shooting rifles far is fun. Shooting rifles far, from weird positions, while there’s a timer going, and two random guys are judging you, and you're thinking, Oh crap, my magazines are not in my gun. Did I dial back from the first shot? And was that target by the big, white rock or that bush? is fun.

I had a pretty good feeling I was going to like NRL Hunter. I enjoy endeavors that require extreme detail and extreme concentration, while also being competitive. When you stand in front of a range officer, and he confirms you understand the stage, there’s no room for anything else in your mind. No bills, no projects at work, no crying baby, it’s just concentration on the task at hand: Finding the target or targets, getting DOPE, building a position, remembering to dial, putting your magazine in the gun, and finally executing a good shot where you can see your impact and correct course or move on to the next target or position, and doing it all again.

I had been preparing for well over a year because I was originally going to shoot a match in 2025, but wasn’t able to due to previous obligations. I had practiced shooting off of various objects and done my best to replicate what I might see at the event. I’d say I did a fairly good job of preparing for the position portion of the stages, but that’s only one piece of a much bigger pie.

Finding targets is one of the best ways to save time. The faster you find the target and get a good range, the longer you have to shoot. Of course, this is much easier said than done. There were multiple occasions when I knew targets were set up left to right, yet I still spent copious time looking to the left of the first target. Once you’ve found the target, it becomes all about the efficiency of movement. This is where being extremely familiar with your rifle helps immensely.

I was fairly clunky with grabbing my magazine and getting it into the gun. When you see guys who are at the upper echelon of the sport, they will keep the gun directly on target while putting their mag in, making it so they spend zero time trying to re-locate the target. When it came to closing the bolt and engaging the targets, I felt pretty confident that once I was in position, I could control myself well enough to make clean shots, and for the most part, I did that. Now, if you have a perfect range and perfect DOPE and make a perfect wind call, breaking the shot is all you have to worry about.

In reality, that’s rarely the case, which is where spotting your impacts comes into play. Spotting impacts while prone on a nice flat spot is fairly easy with a twelve-pound 6.5 Creedmoor, but if the gun is propped up on a rock and your left foot is wedged in a crack and your right leg is gripping the ledge next to you, spotting your impact becomes much more interesting. This is a portion of the event where I need lots of work. Not only do I need to spot more of my impacts, but I also have to have the brain capacity to use the information I gather from spotting the impact.

With all of these things happening inside a four-minute window, it is absolutely the best way to practice for hunting. Not because you’re going to have to shoot two animals that are placed near to far from two different positions, but because it puts you in a pressure cooker–a pressure cooker that I thought could only be brought on by having an animal in front of me. However, with my new obsession, I’ll get to run through that scenario countless times with a piece of steel in preparation for when it’s a Dall sheep.