How far do you travel to attend an airgun shoot?
For most of us, the answer is tens of miles, maybe a hundred on occasion. But for the Extreme Benchrest competition, many of the attendees have traveled – you guessed it – extreme distances to be here!
Of course there are competitors here who have traveled from all across the USA. Michael Wendt of Airgun Nation traveled 2,800 miles from Hawaii to attend the shoot, I flew 2,000 miles from Upstate New York and several others came from similar distances.
Below, .177 cal doesn’t cut it at Extreme Benchrest.
But these distances pale into insignificance when you consider how far some international competitors came to reach the Rio Salado range in Mesa, AZ.
Probably the prize for extreme travel to the 2016 Extreme Benchrest shoot goes South African Matt Dubber. He flew something like 9,500 miles to take part!
And the significant number of attendees from Europe – including England, Italy, Germany, Sweden and Norway – all flew around 5,200 miles to reach this event.
But one young shooter at this competition made us all sit up and take notice…
Yngve Tangen is just 14 and a half years old. But he traveled from Norway with his parents to attend Extreme Benchrest 2016. That means the Tangen family together flew a total of something like 16,000 miles so that Yngve could participate in Extreme Benchrest.
Yngve – that’s him in these photographs – explained to me that he first found out about Extreme Benchrest a couple of years ago via YouTube. Ever since, he’s wanted to attend and this year he’s here. As the Tangen family live in the countryside outside Oslo, Yngve shoots air rifle from home in his back yard and neighboring fields.
But Yngve and his parents didn’t just travel to Extreme Benchrest, they brought his Hammerli air rifle with them so that he could compete. Unfortunately laws in Norway limit the caliber of airguns to .177 cal. That makes him seriously out-gunned for shooting at 75 yards and beyond, but help was soon at hand.
To give him a fighting chance, Matt Dubber lent him the .30 caliber FX Impact that he’s using for Extreme Benchrest.
And fellow Scandinavian Fredrik Axelsson – the owner of FX Airguns – helped Yngve with some advice on shooting techniques with the Impact, as we see below.
How will Yngve make out at Extreme Benchrest 2016? Of course it’s too early to say yet, the competition is only just beginning.
But one thing’s for sure, he’s gaining a huge amount of knowledge and experience just by being here, participating in Extreme Benchrest 2016 and meeting the other competitors.
Yngve’s parents confirmed that they are extending their stay in the US by a short visit to Las Vegas and a couple of other cities. However, as Yngve said “ If it wasn’t for Extreme Benchrest, we wouldn’t be here. This is the real reason for our visit!”
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