President’s Letter 2009 - Iowa 1000 Yard Benchrest Association

I want to thank all of you for another great year of 1000 yard competition at the Iowa 1000 Yard Benchrest Association. There was plenty of super shooting, even when we had to shoot over the floods of 2008. We all witnessed several records being set, and everyone had a great time!!

We have people from many states that come to compete at our club on a regular basis. One thing I want to mention here is that we saw some all-time IBS records set at our club this year. Stephen Fischer set a new IBS Heavy Gun 6 match Group Agg record of 6.0568”. Stephen also achieved the coveted IBS Junior Shooter of the Year award in 2008. His dad, Lee Fischer not only won the top honors at our club again this year (like usual!!!!), he also set a new IBS 10 match Heavy Gun Group Agg record of 7.3258”. Way to go, Stephen and Lee!!

We have a few things to make you aware of as we plan for the upcoming season, which will be upon us before we know it. The weather this winter started out almost like last year, but hopefully the floods stay away - we don’t want to run targets with a john boat (although the target crew would probably have a ball doing that)!!!

First, our scheduled dates for the regular 2009 season are as follows: April 18, May 16, June 13 (Iowa State Championship), July 11, and September 19. We originally had scheduled a match for August 15, but ran into motel problems (no rooms available due to the Knoxville Sprint Car Nationals the same time), so we rescheduled this match to September 19.

The high point of our season this year will be the IBS 1000 Yard Nationals on September 3-5, which our Iowa club is hosting for the second time. We have this scheduled for Thursday-Saturday, September 3-5, with Sept 6-7 as rain dates. We are also going to shoot a four-target agg format, which has never been done before in an IBS Nationals. This has generated much excitement in the 1000 yard community, and should make for a very competitive and exciting national competition. We hope all of you can come and compete in the Nationals with us!

The Friday evening cookouts at the range continue to be very popular, so we plan to continue that again this season - Randy and Matt sure do a great job with that, don't they!

The September 19 match will be our annual "awards" match, where we hand out all the yearly aggregate awards and also a lot of door prizes. We normally give out several thousand dollars in prizes to the club members who attend this final match, so make sure you don't miss this year’s "awards" match - hopefully it will be even bigger and better than last years.

We want to thank the sponsors who so generously donated to this year’s prizes and awards, so you can make sure to thank them also by doing business with them this year. The main prize donors this past year were Brownells, Hornady Bullets, Sierra Bullets, and others. Please make sure you thank them for their generosity!

We are including a 2009 membership renewal form for the Iowa 1000 Yard Benchrest Association that you can mail in with your 2008 membership fees. As most of you know, club membership is required by our insurance carrier to give coverage to us and to all members who compete at our matches, but we made a change a couple years ago in how we do this and the annual membership prices were lowered from what they had been.

The IBS had requested we change the way we did our memberships in order to promote more traveling between clubs. So now when you register at each match, you will automatically be a "member" for IBS and insurance purposes, whether you pay the annual membership fee or not. This way if a person travels to a number of different clubs throughout the year, he won't need to pay an annual membership fee at every club as well as the match fees like they had to in the past. But we still need to have most of the regular shooters become paying Iowa club members so we will be able to cover all the expenses to keep operating.

So to make this work, we are making annual club membership optional for those who do not wish to become a member, we reduced the cost of annual membership quite a bit, and we are promoting membership by giving club awards and some good prizes at the end of the year that will be for annual club members only.

Each match and at the end of the year, we will give out IBS awards like always, but we will also be giving out club awards and quite a few great door prizes that you must be an annual club member to receive. We will be keeping track of and giving awards for club records, club group and score aggs, and monthly club wins that will only be for annual club members.

We are going to try something a little different this year at our first match with our match fees in one regard (and if it works well we will continue it). Instead of doing the closest to center pool the way we’ve done it in the past, we are going to add $2 per person for the day to the existing match fees, and everyone then will be in the running for closest to center. Payout will stay the same – one overall winner in the morning and one in the afternoon, with the winners each getting half the pot. This change will make it much easier for the scoring staff to track this award.

I want to thank all the club officials for their assistance in making this year go as smoothly as it did: Lee, Juli and Stephen Fischer, Dave Clark, Randy Bonnett, Matt Bonnett, Chris McLees, Dean Walther, Doug Van Wyk, and my wife, Chris Gritters, who cooks and does the food service on match days. We also want to thank our target crew Jordan Pinegar and Colton Pinegar who did a great job helping Matt run targets. We couldn’t have done a very good job without everyone's help running the matches.

I want to thank all our sponsors who gave funds to help us build the great benches we shoot from: Dave Clark (who built all the bench frames), Brownell’s, Elkin Co, Varmint Hunter Assoc, D&B Supply, Vais Muzzle Brakes, Holland’s Shooters Supply, Bob’s Shooting Supplies, Nesika Bay Precision, Red Door Storage, Pella Corp, Pacific Tool & Gauge, Ron Boyd -“In Memory of Marvin Boyd”, Bob “The Avenging Angel” Pastor, Mose Levy Steel, Lee Fischer, and Gordy's Gunsmith Shop. I also want to thank the Boat family (the folks who own the ground and clubhouse) for letting us rent the place for our use and rework it for our ranges.

Keep an eye on our club’s website - www.iowa1000ydbenchrest.com - for details on match schedules, match results, equipment lists, range records, and other details.

Remember to also keep an eye on the IBS website for our member’s national standings, gun and equipment rules, and rules of competition. You can access the IBS website - www.international-benchrest.com -directly or you can link there through our club’s website.

I am again offering some very in-depth classes this year in 1000 Yard/Long Range Shooting and also some classes in custom gunsmithing for those who are interested in learning more about any of this. Class dates are added periodically throughout the year and details on these classes are on my shop website – www.gordysgunsmithshop.com .

I am really looking forward to seeing you all soon and shooting with you again in 2009!

Gordy Gritters, Club President