Big Sandy Shoot - 03.28.2015

The Big Sandy Shoot

It's been a bit since I posted, but hopefully this will make up for it. I was out of town for a little over a week the day after this and things are finally getting back to normal ( read this as "cleaned up" ) around the  house.

I went up to the Big Sandy Shoot this year with some friends for my birthday. I've never been or heard it mentioned by name before this. It happens twice a year, once in March and once in October. Supposedly October is the bigger one where people roll in with tanks and such. It's basically the largest machine gun shoot in the U.S. People come from all around with their artillery, machine guns, Mortars and everything else you can imagine.

Explosive targets are set up all over the hills and mountain side anywhere from 200-500 yards away. I know these are all night shots, mostly because fireworks aren't nearly as cool during the daytime and dynamite does not explode into a huge ball of flames like it does in the movies. In the images you might notice little green light dots. Those are the normal variety glow sticks taped vertically to wooden stakes with dynamite on them and the horizontal ones are 4 packs of fireworks ( either 3" or 4" shells mostly ). The company I work with doing fireworks a couple of times a year, sets those out before the night shoot so we can watch the sky light up all pretty. Some of the vertical ones further out have a stick with some detonation cord which goes down into a big bucket of ANFO for some larger booms.

 This gentleman is strapping his planes up with glow sticks for the night shoot. He flies them back and forth in front of the shooters as a moving target. His best run was 8 passes before one of his planes got shot down. He has about 30 planes with liquid fuel powered engines. He fills each fuel tank about halfway for the runs.

  Some the gents from FPA during the night shoot. Thanks for letting me take these pictures guys!

 Sporting the FPA shirt.All the red and green lines running across are tracer rounds. They use them every few rounds in a machine gun so that you can see where/what you're shooting/hitting.

 You can see all the glow sticks scattered around. Each of those has a stick of dynamite attached to it for a satisfying hit confirmation.

 Bowling ball mortar - Edward Arms

Hope you enjoyed the pics. It was a fun experience. I'll hopefully get some more links for some video from the friends I went with.