Smokin' & Shootin'

Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar...

This past weekend was the 12th annual West Houston Smoke & Powder Crawl. I've been an attendee for the 9th and the 11th Crawls, and this year's event was just as much fun!

I'd invited the Cisco Kid along for the trip. He enjoys a good cigar as much as I do, and he's a shooter as well.

We met the crew out at American Shooting Center, and were given our stash of goodies. Richard, the organizer, asks several cigar companies to kick in some samples, so there's usually something new & interesting to smoke. He's asked us to review some of the cigars, so I might try to do that before too long. I've never reviewed a cigar beyond the "Tastes pretty good!" stage, so we'll see how that goes.

We had a good sized crowd this year. 11 shooters in total, if I counted right. It was a bit of a warm day, so I was more focused on staying in the shade than running around counting people.

I brought along the Springfield Armory .45 auto, and the Ruger .357 Magnum. I almost brought the S&W .22 auto for some low-cost plinking, but it's a major PITA to take apart for cleaning, so I left it at home.

I did quite well in the cigar shoot-off. We used some of my shoot & see targets, and shot 10 rounds each at 15 yards for lowest score, using a zero score X-ring. 4 people used long-barreled .22 pistols. There were a couple of 6" bbl .38s, and a couple of 9mm autos. I used my 3" Ruger Speed Six with Winchester White Box 110 grain JHPs, and absolutely went to town. If I hadn't gotten a twinge of buck fever, I would have won going away, even with that short barrel. As it was, I had one round out of the scoring area, and two completely off the paper, but the remaining 7 shots were grouped dead center & you could have covered them with a teacup.

Even with the three flubbed shots, that was good enough for 2nd place. Cisco Kid took first place shooting his Beretta NEOS .22 auto. So, to add to the big pile of cigars, we won... even more cigars! Woohoo!

Afterwards we went to Paul's Boat on Hwy Six for seafood & more cigars. I had a quite tasty piece of red snapper stuffed with whatever it is they stuff seafood with. The gecko in the rafters and the buzzard on the dumpster from last year joined us again, which was nice.

I had to miss the rest of the crawl to deal with the battery issue mentioned in my previous post, but I'm sure everyone had a great time.

These are held every year about this time, so if you're a cigar fan and a shooter, (ah, that would be Dash, Walrilla and the Layabout Sailor!) mark your calendar for #13 coming up in 2009!