Congrats to our friend Lou! Team Berger’s Lou Murdica took home the 4-Gun Benchrest State Championship in California this year with a grand aggregate of 0.1805. For those of you not familiar with Benchrest shooting, that means he got an AVERAGE 5-shot group size of only 0.1805″ at 100 yards over 40 matches!*

Lou is a long time friend of us here at Berger. He not only shot along side Walt Berger for years, but he helped us develop our reloading manual and our BR Column bullets. He is a well accomplished shooter who crosses between several disciplines from Smallbore to 1,000 yard F-Class.

The California State Championship is a combination of two different matches that take place in Visalia, California. Over the course of 4 days, competitors shoot Light Varmint, Heavy Varmint, Sporter, and Unlimited type benchrest rifles at both 100 and 200 yards. All 40 of the matches combine to create the grand aggregate score.*

“I went to the Visalia California State Championship for an Unlimited and Heavy Varmint (HV) Shoot. I won the Unlimited, was fourth in HV, and won first place overall for the weekend,” says Lou. “I shot the same exact load of Vihtavuori N133 and used the same seating depth for both guns. Only change was in the tuner.”

Short range benchrest is considered the most demanding and competitive rifle shooting discipline, and match winners are often determined by as little as 0.001″ (ten-thousands of an inch!). Competitors shoot custom-made, specialized single-shot, bolt-action target rifles that weigh between 10.5 and 13.5 pound depending on their weight classes. In in unlimited class, they go even further and develop even more specialized rifles that look closer to barrel test fixtures than rifles! The sport is one that requires shooters to put in more effort before the match developing their rifle and load than any other discipline, which makes wins like this quite rewarding!

*Note: the 200 yard group sizes are divided by 2 to get the aggregate score.