Competition A Real Blast For Shooters Dynamite-Packed Cans Make Exciting Targets
Kerry Standish’s heart beats to a different gun.
She used that beat Saturday to blow a Pepsi can into the wind from 975 yards.
“I take five deep breaths and four real short ones and it slows my heart so it’s in tune with the gun,” the Chilco resident said. “I can’t miss.”
Standish was the only person at the first-ever Blanchard Blast - a marksmanship competition - to hit a target beyond 900 yards.
She did it using her husband’s unusual rail gun: a fat-bottomed rifle that slides onto a support block for target shooting. She hit it in one shot. And she wasn’t even competing.
Boy was her husband mad, she said.
“Somebody just wanted me to show them how it worked,” she said of the weapon. “Now I think I’m in trouble for the rest of the day.”
The Blanchard Blast was organized by gun enthusiast J.R. Shepard to raise money for his fledgling cable access show “Sportsmen of the Northwest.” It’s distinguished from most marksmanship events by its targets - soda cans stuffed with half-sticks of dynamite.
“It’s great because you get real immediate feedback,” said Post Falls resident Bill Sertich.
Plugging a slug into the bottom of a can sends a smoke ring curling up through the horseshoe-shaped canyon off Highway 41 just north of the Bonner County line. A shot to the top of the can sends smoke snaking across the underbrush.
One second later the ground is rocked by a thundering “boom.”
Nearly 50 shooters from Montana, Washington and Idaho - ages 6 to 80 - paid $5 for three shots or $25 for unlimited rounds. More than 100 cans were set up at distances ranging from 350 yards to 1,100 yards.
Not that they’re easy to hit. It takes a shooter like 12-year-old Mark Boss to pull it off.
“Cool!” he shouted, after exploding a can at 350 yards.
Thirteen-year-old Christie Boss, clad in a T-shirt depicting a yellow smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead, was not so lucky.
“People don’t understand that 350 yards is a long ways,” Shepard said. “And that’s the close stuff.”
Fourteen-year-old Dean Isenberg grumbled after missing three shots with his scopeless muzzle loader.
Still, spraying dirt beside the bright red can was impressive enough.
Isenberg, who is colorblind, was sighting his rifle by ear.
“I had to listen to them tell me how far off I was,” he said, glancing toward a spotter leaning into binoculars.
MEMO: IDAHO HEADLINE: Booming fun time