I’d love to hear your guys process for finding targets.
Here’s something I put together that I shot from the hip but after watching the video theres a few things i’m missing that I wish I would’ve explained deeper.
Priming your brain - things to look for. A few years ago I did a podcast talking about this in detail with a SME about how your brain works. I think for NRL the obvious would be looking for T-Posts or straight edges around the targets.
Hasty search - I kind of covered it in this video, but my initial hasty search is finding the target reference points or “anchor points” as I like to refer them to so that I have a general idea of where I’ve looked but also if I was the “match director” or “the animal” this is where I’d be moving through or place a target.
Detailed search - Burning through the “negative space” as I call it. This truly requires spotters but you can definitely do it with binos assuming that you are not scanning and just using your peripheral.
Love to hear your guys process on what you’ve found successful with finding targets in either an NRL Hunter event or in the field as a hunter.
Here’s a few obvious ones. When I RO it always surprises me how many people mess these up or don’t do them.
Pay attention to the sighting pins and set yourself up on sighting post.
Ask questions. A lot of times on 4 target stages you may find the targets out of order. Describe them and ask them if they’re target n.
Only other thing that pops into mind is thinking logically. At the Burning Mountain match there was a 2 target, near to far, stage. The first target was at the top of the hill on the far left. The terrain was such that to the right, the hillside gets closer the more you go to the right until the far right side where it goes further back again. Logically, the only place the second target could be is on the far right because it’s the only place you could place a target further than the first one. That cut out a lot of ground that you don’t have to waste your time looking at. Obviously you can’t do things like this on every stage, but when you can, it saves a lot of time.
Thanks for posting this topic. Finding targets is my achilles heel and unlike ranging and engaging, it’s hard to come up with a way to practice finding targets. Best I’ve come up with is setting up on a hilltop when I go for a mtn bike ride and practice glassing around me (I’ve found a lot of garbage).
I watched Phil’s 3.4A video. Good stuff, and appreciate you walking us through your system. This is what I’ve come up with over the last couple years of shooting NRLH matches:
99% of the time I glass off my tripod, but when I first come running up on the stage I’m looking at what’s in front of me (terrain and veg). That usually gives me some clues to how tall to make my tripod for glassing. For instance: if the ground is level in font of me with little to no brush or tall grass, I probaby won’t take the time to extend the tripod legs and just glass from a low kneeling position. But if there is tall veg or terrain in front of me I’ll set my tripod up at a standing height.
While deploying the tripod I try to look over the target area with my naked eyes. Sometimes I get lucky and spot the placard right away or what I think is the placard (once it was a white 5 gal bucket), but also to familiarize myself with the left and right extent of the target area. And like you mentioned in your video, identify key features that stand out as future target reference points.
Sometimes I’ve noticed that the target animal can suggest the distance. Smaller targets (ground hogs, gophers, or rabbits) are typically 300-ish yards out, full-size deer/elk silhouettes are typically 800-1,000 out. Howling coyote, ram heads, antelope head/shoulder are usually mid-distance (400-600 yds). So knowing what animal shape I’m searching for sometimes helps me to know if I should start scanning close or far.
“Oh sh!t, can’t find the target and the clock is ticking….” This is when I try to stay calm and not panic. This is when I confirm my left and right indicators again. One match, for the life of me I could not find the 2nd target of the 2 target/2 position stage. I knew it was Left-Right, so came off glass and lined myself up on the right indicator flag. Found Target 2 almost immediately. It was a wide vector, and it was almost like the MD was throwing us a big clue with the right indicator pointing right at T2. Duh, lesson learned.
Some MDs are trickier than others. I know one that likes to make certain targets only visible from lower down around knee height vs being able to see it from a standing height. I know another MD who’s interpretation of Near to Far is to put Target 2 ten yards further out, but way over to the left or right (IOTW, the stage description should read L-R rather than N-F, but technically T2 was farther than T1…). So sometimes you need to try and get in the head of the MD and imagine what he/she was trying to achieve.
Once you find your target, I need to remember to take the time to find a reference point visible with the naked eye. Maybe I should capitalize this. And underline it. In bold. With flashing lights and dancing girls. I sometimes forget to do this, and as a result the rest of the stage becomes a dumpster fire. It can be tough when everything looks the same.
Glad you and Clint brought up asking questions of the RO. I need to do that more to confirm Target sequence, especially on the 4 Target/1 position stages when the L-R or N-F order is not that obvious. I RO’d a 4 coyote/1 position stage last year where a large percentage of the shooters could not find Target 2 and lost points when they shot targets out of order. The ones that were more successful (i.e. skipped T2 and went straight to T3) asked questions to confirm target sequence. IIRC, T1 and T3 were facing right, T2 and T4 were facing left, and pretty sure that was another clue the MD was trying to throw us.
I think that does it for now. By the way, each one of the lessons learned items above was paid for in lost match points….