Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

I think that this Rooster Mountain was one of the best matches since the millennium and SSIN Shooting Club has the honor. Claus Henneberg, Per Bressendorff, Peter Munk and all the stage builders and Range Officers did a great job no doubt about that. In this report I will focus on the match and on the great performances by Ralf and other good shooters.

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

Organization

In April I made the registration to the match and it was easy to book and pay. It is always much easier to pay at once on the Internet so that was a very good feature on the Rooster website. Per is the man behind the website and all the practical things and Per has been match director at Rooster since 2003 – I think? So Per knows how to navigate through the different steps. Very early in the process Per and Claus had called for a meeting with Ralf, Hage and I to go through the stage design. They had asked us to comment on the stage design and we had a meeting in the winter at Pers house in Gentofte. Per knows how important the stage design is and therefore he and Claus wanted some feedback from real competition shooters. Claus, who is a newbie in IPSC, participated in his first level III match (CEEO) outside Denmark in June and I think he got a lot of inspiration there.

Foto: Jack Rømer

Everything worked perfectly; the size of the squads were about 10-15 shooters so there were of course some waiting especially on the hot range on the first day. They should not have a stage that was not easy to reset in a hot range, but that was a minor issue.

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

I heard that the award ceremony was very late and maybe next time they should schedule 11 stages Saturday and 7 stages Sunday then it would be possible for shooters from abroad to travel home Sunday instead of having an extra accommodation.

Foto: Jack Rømer

Stage design

As mentioned before the stage design was excellent and I wish to give the designers Per and Claus a big applause for a job well done. Generally there was a good mix of easy targets and small plates on 15 meters so everyone was challenged even open shooters like Saul Kirsch.

Foto: Jack Rømer

The new Danish stage approval gives us a new dimension. Before the approval it was not allowed to shoot on steel without wood on the front side and all targets should be placed no more than 1,5 meter from the backstop. So before this approval it was very hard to design good and challenging stages in Denmark. This is probably one of the main reasons that this Rooster was one of the best ever!

Per and Claus had thought on everything and one of the small details was the stairs on stage 8. Here they had put “chicken wire” on the stairs, so if it got wet because of heavy rain, the shooter still would be able to run fast and shoot accurate…nice ;-)

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

It was obviously that the stage builders’ had used many hours on building the stages and one of the pioneers in this great Team was Hans Jørgen Jensen. Hans Jørgen is over 70’ and still going strong, he shoots like a man in his 50’ and is always willing to help building stages even if it takes more than 60 hours in high sun with temperatures reaching over 30 degrees.

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

Range Officers

People who are working their butt off at big matches always impress me!!! The Range Officers (the ones in red shirts) is a special kind of people and some of them attend the match only to work as a RO. They all did a great job at RM and I didn’t see a single wrong decision on my squad. There were also some CRO at the match, but they were mostly sitting in the shade looking satisfied with life. There were 4 DQ’s at the match so that was not much out of 131 shooters.

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

Denmark is a little country far away from central Europe and the cost is also much higher, but despite of that, top-shooters came to hunt the famous president medal. Saul Kirsch came with his shop and friend Eli Huttner who has now moved to Copenhagen, Carl Deleu from Belgium, Ljubisa Momcilovis from Serbia and many fine shooter from Sweden, Norway and Finland.

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

Performances

In standard shooters like Ralf K. Jensen (DK), Mats Bäckström (SWE), Lars Syversen (NOR) and Christian Thomsen (DK) fought about the Nordic title. I had no doubt about who would be the winner of this game and as you all probably know, Ralf won his first Nordic championship. Congratulation to Ralf!!!

"These stages are the best stages I have ever seen at Rooster Mountain. I shot strategic and rather safe (trying not to push too hard), and it worked: 0 mikes and PT's . I shot only 6 D’er and two of them were shot deliberately to save an extra shooting position.

I especially liked that the stages had a lot of change in tempo with easy targets and difficult targets far away. Also good that a lot of stages rewarded you for shooting on the move (e.g. stage 10).  The match was maybe a little to hard  to shoot for the average shooter because a lot of shooters got many  misses and PT's.

I am very great full for the help Kristian Pedersen gave me some  days before the match where he fixed my trigger despite of water in his  basement. And also thanks to my sponsors STI and Centerarms."
Quoted by Ralf K. Jensen

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

Revolver division was also Nordic Championship and Anders Lindfors (SWE), Olle Lindskog (SWE) and Kristian Pedersen (DK) tried to win the title, but for his 3rd time Ole Eilertsen won the match – Congratulation!

Foto: Jack Rømer

In Open Saul had a walk over because nobody else at this match could beat him even on a bad day. So despite of lack of international topshooters in Open I will congratulate Saul with his PM.

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard

Finally we have production with attendance of one of the best shooters in Europe, Ljubisa Momcilovis. Our Scandinavian Champion Rasmus Gyllenberg was the hardest competitor to Ljubisa and we know from earlier matches that Rasmus can threat the best in Europe. And so he did! Rasmus was only 1,62 % or 25 points behind Ljubisa so Rasmus had a very good performance. I was lucky to be on their squad and I must say Ljubisa almost shot a clean match with very few errors. Hage, Timo Mckeowen and Even Skaarer tried to hang on but to many errors costed them many points. There was about 10% distance from Ljubisa and Rasmus to the rest of the shooters. I really don’t know where I would be in this classification because I started not so good but performed better and better until I got my 3rd DQ in my 15 years of shooting IPSC.

Foto: Jack Rømer

Summary

The design of stages was excellent, the RO’s were keen and professional and the atmosphere was good and humorous.

Personally I liked the stage design and the combination of easy and difficult targets is my favorite.

Thanks to SSIN…see you at Swedish Nationals in August

Foto: Louise Bangsgaard