TO BE HONEST, STEWBACCA HAS BEEN EQUAL PARTS EXCITED AND DREADING HAVING TO WRITE THIS, GIVEN HIS PROPENSITY TO WAR AND PEACE HIS WAY THROUGH TEN TO TWELVE PAGES FOR A TYPICAL LEVEL 3 NATIONAL ACTION AIR EVENT OF TWELVE STAGES OVER A WEEKEND, AND HAS BEEN CONTEMPLATING JUST HOW TO CRAM ALL OF THE ADVENTURE OF A THIRTY STAGE COMP WITH THREE SOLID DAYS OF SHOOTING, AND TEN DAYS IN COUNTRY WITH ALL THE FANFARE AND INTRIGUE AS WELL AS THE HUMAN STORIES…

So, where to begin? I guess I waxed lyrical at length somewhat in the last issue with the administrative-related fun times of travel arrangements and carrying guns or anything that looks like them on aircraft from various parts of the world into a firearms permissive country with a general love of shooting and related sports.

As I mentioned in Part One, my teammate Ou and myself (and his wife Wei who was travelling with us for the experience of the Philippines, but not involved in the world shoot aspect, although she has joined the team and trained before) were the ‘white rabbits’ or ‘wild weasels’, the first to go and last to know as such, and test cases for all the misadventures that all of our Taiwan-based shooters would have to go through, or in many cases we made things easier for them by prebriefing the airline staff and authorities on the twenty odd other guys and girls who would be hot on our heels.

We departed on the 25th of July after an hour or so delay as our plane arrived on the pan about ten minutes before it was due to leave (yeah, that wasn’t happening!) as well as two typhoons circling Taiwan and the Philippines which lead to some flight cancellations within the latter; thankfully we managed to dodge the worst of it.

I’d basically finally taken a contract break from the day job having not had one since starting eight years back, so I took a wedge of unpaid leave and relieved myself of the first month or so of the reduced hours, increased class size and stress summer course, to just give myself time to do final preparations, a load of side project work for this publication and design related work… and just in general have the flexibility to react to issues and resolve them prior to departure! It was certainly a pleasant three weeks of only teaching my Saturday classes followed by two weeks of total absence for the actual travelling and competing portion.

Arriving finally in Iloilo mid-evening we all settled in and refreshed ourselves before heading across the road from the hotel to involve ourselves in the local culture and cuisine, a theme which persisted throughout the adventure! The hospitality and food in the Philippines are almost as unquestionable as their marksmanship, and I was glad I’d invested in the Double Alpha adjustable ratchet belt clasp a few months prior; the Lynx belts are excellent and fast becoming standard fare for competitive shooters from what I’ve seen, but a rigid number of one inch pieces doesn’t leave much room for… manoeuvre… when you like to eat more than you like to run!

We also walked our dinner off and wandered over to the local shopping centre to stock up on snacks and supplies to sustain ourselves throughout our stay, with all of team SPPT residing in the HOP Inn Hotel on the south end of town near the bay, which meant a taxi ride to the convention centre each time we had to shoot or do related admin, but it was probably worth the savings despite the slight inconvenience.

Saturday morning saw Ou and myself head over to the Iloilo convention centre to get our admin out of the way as soon as it opened, beating the rush of the next few days as around five hundred competitors arrived from local regions and much further afield and began their sign in and equipment check.Once we’d secured our shooter cards and goodie bags (including very handy world shoot branded water canteen and folding chair) we once again voted with our stomachs and dined at a local steakhouse before returning to spend the afternoon putting together a briefing package for the other Taiwanese shooters.

Pre-shoot was open and we were allowed to walk the floor and assess the stages from behind their cordons but not actually enter and fully ‘brief’ all the movements and positions. Nonetheless it was useful to see how things varied from the ‘artists impressions’ which were released (or at least half of them were) to allow people to practise remotely for some of the stages and just get their heads around them in general. Job done, and having bumped into a few familiar faces from afar already, we retired for another local dinner and then the hotel to check our equipment; venting all the magazines for air travel inevitably lead to leaky main seals so we serviced them all and resealed them somewhat more leisurely than the people arriving much closer to go time at least.

Sunday for me was largely spent joining our friends from team Spring Rain for an afternoon of turning money into brass/lead/powder which I then turned into noise, burnt powder and smiles, but the live fire shenanigans will be covered in greater detail in the next instalment.

Going Global

Monday saw the arrival of many of the international competitors and again familiar faces some of whom I was meeting in person for the first time, others who I was seeing again, typically after too long, as I often feel is the case.

Ou and I spent a lot of our time as booth bunnies at Clarence’s CLPD stall, where we were showing off not only our personal Production Optics CLPD Shadow 2 Oranges, but also a wide array of his latest custom components as well as meeting other sponsored shooters who had descended upon Iloilo.

We also had time to saunter around the other stalls and check out some of the latest equipment from various suppliers, including trying out a virtual IPSC stage system with a laser video game gas blowback training style setup using a projector; naturally everyone was getting in the competitive mood to set the best time, especially the Hong Kongers! We also had the pleasure of meeting some of the local shooters, and along with the 4UAD squad who had arrived, we were treated to excellent hospitality and an awesome big ‘family’ feeding with a fair sized group of the Philippines shooters, Clarence and Katherine and ourselves, all thanks to Trish (and Brian albeit in absence) for organising an epic meal on the beachfront with the waves rolling in and an awesome sunset spent drinking from coconuts! Excellent food and drink, even better company, as is my wont and good fortune it seems…

Tuesday the 29th saw the arrival of the rest of our team and a reunion lunch followed by the opening festivities in the evening, thankfully quite close to our hotel in a sports centre which we decided to take a motorcade of motorcycle sidecar taxis the short ride to and avoiding working up too much of a sweat off the bat.

The nineteen countries represented at the

World Shoot rallied their competitors behind their respective signs and we all took the opportunity for selfies, photo ops, banter and catching up with friendly faces before the event kicked off good and proper and we were ushered in alphabetically to enter the arena and take the stage before lining up behind our country signs once again.

This was followed by the range office and officials groups and then the opening addresses from the IPSC president Vitaly, Range director Myro and local officials representing Iloilo, also followed by the cultural element of their traditional dancers in costume which certainly dazzled the crowd. We also took the opportunity to deck all the CLPD sponsored shooters present in our team jerseys and get a nice big family photo with the man himself and his good lady Katherine of course… It’s always great to feel a part of something bigger and among the best of company.

Wednesday the 30th rolled around and we dragged ourselves out of bed somewhat groggy from the inevitable festivities of the night before and donned our team jerseys for day one of the main event. Ten stages a day for three of the four shooting days, with every squad having a rest day somewhere in among it, ours being the Friday. Most of the shooters were squadded into ‘overall’ teams of four from each country or team working together and competing against two other teams of four in each squad of twelve, split by division for the most part.

Ou, myself, Dong Liang and Wei had decided early on in the planning phase to team up as a four man squad from our various local teams and represent Taiwan in Production Optics division, with Ou and myself running CLPD Shadow 2 Oranges, and the other two running Glocks. We got special jerseys done just for our squad, as well as velcro patches with our gun types and our four ‘avatars’ or mascots of sorts emblazoned on them. I also took the liberty of tracking down four Taiwanese stone tiger plushies, our team mascot being the eponymous endangered native feline which also took pride of place on our left sleeves. Due to various competitors being unable to make the trip after sign up, and others opting to squad with their own national teammates, there was some reshuffling of things and while we had originally we had been slated to compete alongside Hong Kong and Macau squads. In the end the Macau folks seemed to squad largely with themselves and we got substituted a squad of Filipino sportsmen; I think we wouldn’t have had such a raucous time without the reshuffle, with livewires Clyde Santos, Ed Vergara Jr, Jan Michael Santiago and Roger Gerardo making for plenty of lively camaraderie and exchanges balanced out by the usually more stoic and focused Hong Kong shooters Warout Lau, Ricky Lau, Justin Chan and Sky Fong.

NO TIME FOR A BREAKDOWN!

Normally I’d give breakdowns of the stages and we might find space for a photo of the layout CAD or an in situ picture of someone running it, but with thirty to deal with and many of them blurring into similarity I’ll eschew the usual depth and focus on the performance, human element and things of note; more details can be found in the innumerate photos on my public Facebook Stewbacca Island Insider page should you be so interested…

Squad 16 assembled on stage 16 around 08:00 ready for the first of many briefings and walkthroughs, with us doing stages 17-20 before breaking for lunch, followed by stages 11-15 afterwards.

Stage 17 messed me up as my first run was really slick, fast and accurate, but the ending plate didn’t register my final hit, so I had to do a re-shoot almost immediately after and picked up a no-shoot as a result of being a bit flustered (another technical fault that screwed me over)! I shot it otherwise clean aside from a single charlie out of 22 hits, so I was personally having a middling day with the usual excellent marksmanship but slow old man knees and Philippine feeding-related chonk holding me back!

That and in general, the stages had to be designed with the stature of the myriad junior competitors in mind, so many of the windows in barricades, or other obstacles were comically low for me and resulted in planning a lot of finishes on my knees (ooh err) as getting back up again or squatting low with my knees is no small feat, and I’m apparently not permitted to fold myself over and shoot somewhat inverted either under the rules it seems!

Another departure from the norm was the inclusion of ‘falling plates’ in a few of the stages, particularly stage 15 at the end of my first day was painful and took me nearly half a minute to complete. This would be the source of much conversation and consternation over the course of the event it seems; falling plates were specifically not counted as poppers in the rules and therefore could not be challenged on calibration grounds (as indeed many poppers were throughout, usually unsuccessfully as far as I saw) but while the porting of real steel ideas over to action air added to a lot of diversification of target presentations, the reliable dislodging of the falling plates (or lack thereof, it seems!) caused a great deal of dismay, especially in the top-end shooters where fractions of seconds are everything.

Personally, I was under no illusions of finishing anywhere near the top of the board given the competition present, and was largely there for the experience and to bring you the story of course, but personally I knocked the first of two ‘Mickey Mouse’ ear style plates on a swinging arm that presented them through gaps or over the top of a barricade momentarily during their travel, then dumped four definite hits into the second before it finally fell, eating so much time and ammunition in the process that re-watching the first person headcam and third person phonecam videos is borderline painful, but, what can you do?

Nothing, apparently, with word round the campfire spreading of the stages involving such targets, strategising inevitably resulted in many electing to ‘eat it’ on the misses rather than waste the time and BBs on unreliable, if interesting, target presentations. In some cases people would just double or triple tap them and incur more reloads just to try and ensure dislodging the plates. That, therefore, made their inclusion a little moot for the most part as the top performers would just game the system or take the losses, whereas I tend to attempt everything out of principle or have the pressing need to ‘finish the fight’ as I take a more combative mindset towards shooting that in all honesty is probably better suited to IDPA than raw sport IPSC at times.

I genuinely appreciate the effort to diversify things, but ideally thinner, lighter aluminium plates with smaller steel or magnet inserts which are more likely to fall upon impact of relatively light BBs rather than the usual required live rounds would likely be preferable in future, given the comparative lack of energy airsoft guns impart on steels which are magnetically held in place.

Many felt the organisation attitude was a bit of a one way street as well it seems, with “It’s a world shoot; no excuses / you should know better!” being the general feeling when competitors had problems, but when aforementioned technical issues ensued it didn’t cut the same way back in the competitors favour as such, the consensus seems to be more testing or ensuring reliable props and their consistent implementation would be better in future, but time constraints and a potential need for standardisation obviously factor in. All that said, aside from one Delta on a moving swinger target on stage 19, I’d done pretty well keeping it predominantly alphas and usually one or two charlies at most for the first day, and had gotten through it otherwise uneventfully, stage 15 falling plates aside.

Second Day Blues

Day Two (Thursday the 31st of July) began on stage 26, at the far back corner of the convention centre, squad 16 congregated and began sorting out our equipment and preparing for the first briefing of the day, which was a bit of a hall of mirrors with lots of different angles on targets hidden behind the various barricades we had to navigate through, largely uneventful at least throughout.

Stage 27, however, almost saw me disqualified on a technicality!

In an attempt to have my head camera and phone ready for filming and not holding things up, I absent-mindedly started briefing with my phone in my hand, and got pulled up by one of the ROs for it who thought I was actively filming my briefing! Thankfully his compatriot clarified that my phone had been flat in my hand and couldn’t have been filming, but I was somewhat shocked by the sudden escalatory attitude for a technicality rather than a safety violation. Thankfully I just picked up my only procedural of the competition and managed to complete the stage without any other incidents at least. This probably comes back to the much more lax environment in Taiwan and the fast and loose ‘wild west, out east’ attitude to enforcing or reminding competitors of such rules which doesn’t serve us on a wider scale at times.

Stage 28 was a relatively stationary shooting position with a pedal activator that had to be stomped on and then released to let loose two swingers, one either side of a the barricaded rear portion. My long arms at least helped me get easier sighting on the swingers but I still managed to pick up another delta on one of them.

Stage 29 involved a sliding target presentation activated by opening a door which I once again managed to use my long arm advantage to activate the door while moving to engage the side bays first so the central targets would have already come to rest by the time I got to them

Last before lunch, Stage 30 was a long run around stage with a lot of target presentations to move through but was really enjoyable to run through and cleared with only 3 charlies out of 29 shots… Good fun!

An early break for lunch having finished a few short courses and one long one in good time saw me and Ou return to booth babe work on the CLPD stand and share our experiences with other shooters checking out the wares and trying to corrupt more of the Hong Kong shooters away from their HiCapa dominated lives to join us in the shadows, as well as a comical impromptu shoulder massage for Mr Santos!

The afternoon saw us take on Stages 21-25 and Vic from Popular Airsoft finally caught up with our squad and we featured in one of his ongoing livestreams for a while as I was once again struggling to contort myself into small spaces to aim through low windows and narrow slots.

Stage 22 was an interesting ‘we’re on a boat’ stage with us shooting from within a prop sail boat we began sitting down in and hand to stand up, turn the wheel to activate the bank of targets and falling plates to the left which raised and lowered from behind a barricade and back down periodically, chamber a round a round and engage them likely having to reload on the way to the other side of the mast and engaging the stationary targets there.

I got a bit of a telling off for being too raucous as we were all having good natured banter throughout and Clyde mucked up the starting condition but the particular RO didn’t appreciate my commentary, and was quite literally, running a tight ship, but I otherwise only picked up a lone charlie along with the sit at the back of the class moment.

Stage 23 was a further problematic stage involving an array of falling plates which were activated along with a slowly opening automatic door by virtue of a push button.

We had to start with the gun on a table and all our mags staged beside it, and I once again struggled to knock the plates down on the first impacts and dumped a magazine to try and eliminate them, then had to run back around to the start table on the front right to retrieve a fresh mag burning through more time again… sucks to be me, I guess… ugh, I hate failures on technical grounds or ‘badministration’ on my own part.

Stage 24 was at least a highlight for me; we’d practised this one at our own club and I’d realised I could game the system by finally using my height to my advantage!

The end of the stage involved a platform most competitors would move forward and mount to shoot through the windows to knock the four falling plates off their stalks and engage the ending plate after engaging all the other target arrays dotted around in front and to the sides of the central rear bay… I, however, managed to just sweep left from the right side engaging everything including the plates through the small windows as I was tall enough to get line of sight from the very rear (Stu special attack!), the only problem being I flustered the left hand paper targets and messed up the stage as a result somewhat, eating four misses on the two papers… sad times, but at least the height advantage move was applauded! I blame Vic for distracting me before my run, that’s my excuse for the flustercluck and I’m sticking to it!

Stage 25 was a lot of knee ache for me, squatting very low to shoot through two floor level windows to engage some papers and poppers on symmetrical presentations, which I once again planned around ending on my knees again to avoid having to get up more than once, the Aussie RO sharing his sympathies for my struggles. I at least shot it clean, and with that we rounded off our second full day of shooting, again fairly early at just after 1500 compared to the planned timings thanks to doing a lot of the shorter stages during the day.

R&R… FOR SOME!

Day Three was our rest day, but that didn’t mean I was slacking off! As part of the media team as well as an active participant, I wanted to take in more of the event during the day where I didn’t actually have to do any shooting myself, and managed to spend some time milling around stages I had already completed and giving my two cents to friends old and new who were passing through them, as well as taking some time to press the flesh and chinwag with some of the competitors I hadn’t had time to meet yet but knew from our online exploits or past competition visits.

I also managed to help out filming some runs for people which in the case of our friend Ning from Hong Kong was very helpful as the footage managed to ratify that she had indeed double tapped a target through the same hole which one of the ROs was unsure about… so it was nice to feel useful at least!

I also finally got to catch up with the UK squad and spend some time seeing them all shoot and asking about their thoughts and feelings about the whole event and their own performances which was nice, followed of course by the obligatory Brit abroad group selfie, naturally!

The evening saw Ou, Wei and myself join Clarence, Katherine, Jacky and Zhong ge for another dinner at the same excellent seaside restaurant down along the coast where we’d met the Filipinos en masse earlier in the week… more coconuts and barbecued meats!

Hit Repeat

Day Four (Saturday the 2nd of August) saw us take on stages - 6-10 in the morning, largely without incident again, before returning for stages 1-5 to finish things off.

Stage 1 saw one of the RO’s questioning my equipment but checking the photos of the equipment check and realising it had already been approved; I hadn’t bothered taking off my own self-retracting chamber flag from my shooters belt.

All the ROs had their own to help clear chambers on guns that don’t naturally drop the BB out when their action is opened, a minor issue that was resolved easily enough by me just ditching it off, but his concern threw me off kilter a bit and I forgot to reload my magazines during the ensuing discussion which messed up my next run on stage 2 as I’d once again done the ‘badministration’ aspect with magazine and ammunition management.

Beyond that I managed to get through the final stages without much incident, aside from tagging a no shoot on stage 4 because I shot that target array first in double action and drove the gun down as a result of the longer, heavier trigger pull. Bad planning on my own part really in that case

Stage 5 rolled around and we finished and all of us breathed a sigh of relief that we had endured all thirty stages over the four days and managed to not get disqualified… not everyone was so lucky, with quite a few suffering technical or safety violations, and some having near misses.

We all stowed our equipment and involved ourselves with taking pictures of the squad and observing and encouraging others who were just finishing up in the same zone as well. In the end it turns out most of squad 16 were the best shooters, with Warout Lau taking second overall, Justin Chan taking 3rd, Ed Vergara taking 4th, Ricky Lau in 5th, Clyde Santos in 6th, Sky

Fong in 9th, our own Ou Jiacheng in 11th, while Jan Michael Santiago in 16th, Wei Syun in 22nd, Dong Liang in 27th, Roger Gerardo taking 38th, and yours truly back in 40th of 46 completing competitors.

I don’t feel too hard done by in all honesty, given the calibre of the competition and the clear capabilities of the other guys in my squad to wipe the floor with basically everyone else in attendance, and just be the best sportsmen and compatriots while doing so.

Overall there were endless hilarious moments and great memories made throughout; our own Lin YiJun also managed to be the best performing lady in our division taking 29th, and she’s only been participating in shooting in general for around two years thus far, and only qualified in IPSC last year, but is clearly a dedicated and capable young lady, including with live firearms which we’ll touch on more in the final instalment.

Luckily the worst member of each four person squad didn’t have their scores counted to the squad scoring for the overall competition between us as groups, so I didn’t feel as bad about being the deadweight as it didn’t drag the other guys down as I had worried about… a good way of scoring to my mind to avoid very bad days dragging everyone down with you.

The evening saw us having a team SPPT Korean BBQ meal which I left after a little earlier having had my fill to go and meet the Filipino and Hong Kong contingents for further drinks and celebrating, the demanding schedule of the social butterfly that I am, fellow shooters! It was great feeling to have everything done with at least and just focus on letting my hair down (I guess that adage doesn’t work for me anymore in reality…), but some still had to wake up early the next morning to shoot again…

Wrapping It All Up

Sunday was the shoot-offs, with the leading trios of each division and age group facing off against each other side by side, doing the exciting simultaneous steel popper-dropping challenges in a best of three format with the competitors swapping fault line boxes after each round. It took the whole morning and into the early afternoon, but spirits were high, and everyone was displaying excellent sportsmanship as competitors duelled it out to decide who was the fastest on felling the plates! lots of hugs, handshakes and cheering crowds which are a bit of a departure of the more isolated individual against yourself and the clock manner of the rest of the competition and stages; you never know until everyone has finished and all the scores are tabulated who has placed where, whereas the shoot outs have a much more direct and competitive tension and feel to them, which adds something extra to the closing days and lets everyone enjoy the exploits of the best competitors.

A power nap in the afternoon refreshed us all somewhat from all the tense action and the summer heat, before we made our way back to the convention centre which had been transformed overnight, all the stages being disassembled and replaced with the dining tables for the final formalities, along with the feasting and announcing the victors.

I made myself busy juggling throwing crepes down my gullet and taking pictures of the officials and competitors taking the stage, the cost of a double or triple life, it seems!

Doing the media bit once again I took so many photos that my phone damn near gave up the ghost and I had to start deleting older files to free up space; needless to say there were an awful lot of Hong Kong flags on the podium, as we’ve all come to expect, along with a good showing from

Macau, and the Philippines hosts, with some of the Mongolians, Indonesians, Taiwanese and Brits taking the stage as well, all in excellent spirits

We also had an additional reason to celebrate as local match director Myro Lopez just happened to be celebrating his birthday among hundreds of the best shooters in the world, so naturally Clarence dragged him up on stage to present a cake and have him share his further thoughts.

And so it was that all of the festivities tailed off as we all made our way back to our hotels, many of us just outright exhausted from the onslaught of action and general lack of sleep most of us had endured.

A great many thanks to Myro for organising an excellent match, Alex Cruz for all her outstanding efforts in getting everyone’s gun permits sorted and helping everyone navigate it all, the sterling work of the RO team and administrative personnel, my squad mates in the Taiwanese stone tigers, team SPPT, Taiwanese compatriots who had a very strong showing, and of course the countless other competitors from myriad countries I had the distinct pleasure of competing alongside and witnessing the skill and dedication of. Until next time, fellow shooters… I think I’ve earned a bit of a rest… but probably not for long!