Joe
Do you mean literally off the target or do you mean off from your point of aim?

I am referring to off the point of aim, usually high but not always. very frustrating especially after you pound five or six in the 25 ring on the sight in target and shoot a 22 or worse for the first shot on the score target. 
Joe S

Joe_S wrote on Jul 17^th, 2021 at 9:21pm:


Do the second and subsequent shots on the score target come back to point of aim?

JOE:
My first experiment would be to shoot, say, 10 shots, alternating targets, shooting even #'d shots on one target and odd #'d shots on the other, and see if the mean POI is different.   That will tell you if there is something amiss in your bench technique.

CHRIS

The exact same thing happened to me at The ASSRA shoot at Etna Green this weekend. I was shooting the 200 yard .22 bench match, the first time I had 6-25's in a row then a 19 at 1:00, then later in the day I had shot 5-25's in a row and it did the same thing, a 19 at 1:00. Both of these were the first shot after moving to the next score target, what really makes that hurt is the first one was a non re-entry match, for that match we get 3 targets for score and turn the best one then, it is over. That is our only match that uses that specific combination. I am thinking one possibility is that I am kind of hard headed and I pretty well insist on shooting traditional type hardware, meaning in this case offhand stocks front and rear. If a shooter is using flat bottom wide stocks that still meet the rule book specs I think things stand a better chance of working this specific type problem out. One thing I did do was sliding the gun forward and back to attempt to bed the rifle into the rest then checking the sights then making any required sight changes, still happened. Really tick's a guy off!

Below is a picture of my own bench setup and the rifle that I shoot. Never having shot a non traditional rifle over the past 23+ years I am not sure how a non traditional rifle might react. When moving from one target to the next.   

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I like what JLouis is saying here and I intend to give it a try along with resting my barrel on the front rest in place to resting on the forearm. Starting on the left, getting things settled in then moving to the right onto the score target sounds good to me. Needless to say starting from the right then indexing to the  left would give the same result.