Coalinga Rifle Club Schedules .50 Caliber Shoot (with photos)

Click to see more photos below

For those of you who have been with the Fifty Caliber Shooters Association (FCSA) for more than the past 10 years, you’ll probably remember all the good times and matches that were held at the Coalinga Rifle Club in central California in the 1990’s. For Teri & I, Coalinga was one of our favorite ranges to shoot on and the people we met there and the times we had bring back some of our fondest memories during the past 18 years. Without going into a long dissertation on the subject, FCSA was asked to leave Coalinga and told not to come back way back in the beginning of our struggle against legislation to ban the .50 BMG.

Recently, a group of very dedicated people have gotten together and over the past several months have very diplomatically created an opportunity for fifty caliber shooters to once again enjoy the pleasures of one of the best shooting ranges in California.

I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce some of the key people who have worked so hard to make this happen.

Bob Pohl - Central CA (Fresno I think)         Brett Berger - Concord CA
Dale Jeong - Oakland CA         Joe Rios - Colton, CA
Lee and Sheri Rasmussin - Langley, WA

Besides having to navigate a very difficult path to overcome the hard feelings between FCSA and the Coalinga Rifle Club this group of stalwart individuals had to come up with a way to provide shooting benches to hold a sanctioned .50 caliber match on a range that had no such facilities. For the past six months I’ve had the privilege of sharing in the email conversations that have been going back and forth between this group and several other fifty caliber shooters. Not the least of which is Lee Rasmussin and his wife Sheri from the state of Washington. If you don’t know, Lee is in the concrete business and when it comes to building shooting benches for .50 caliber shooters, there probably isn’t anyone better to do that job.

Dale Jeong and Bob Pohl contacted Lee asking for his advice on building some shooting benches at Coalinga and these photos (below) depict how labor intensive the task is when it comes to building a competitive shooting bench. Bottom line is, Bob Pohl has been able to secure a firm date to host a .50 caliber match once again at Coalinga Rifle Club. The date set is:

The weekend of June 6th-7th, 2009

For specific match information check your last issue of VHP or the FCSA web site at:
http://www.fcsa.org/visitors/matches09.htm