Ken Nelson

On the advice of fellow IDPA competitors, I bought a 5-11 Tactical vest to use as my concealment during competition.  I had been un-tucking my shirt, or wearing a jacket ( the concealment I use when carrying a weapon in daily life).

In practice, I found that my draw (draw from holster and take aimed shot), which had been about 1.00 flat to 1.2 seconds without concealment, slowed to 1.4 to 1.6 seconds. Not anywhere near the fastest shooters, but competitive if the shot is a zero (center of the target – and they usually are).

After timing my draws with the vest, I moved on to slide-lock reloads, which I can generally do in 1.5 seconds (drop magazine, grab and insert new one, release slide, shoot aimed shot).

And I hit big trouble. I tried 20 and grabbed the vest AND the magazine on all but two of them.  I never did during my dry runs, but did almost every time when going for time.

Clearly I need to dry fire practice more with the vest on.  And I think I’ll put a weight and stiffener into the inside pockets so that a flip of it moves the whole vest.  I was flipping it, grabbing the magazine and getting the middle of the vest (which hadn’t budged).

In terms of fit and comfort, it is very cool and light.  It has many pockets, although I won’t use more than a couple of them because this is for competition not walking around. 

One use for the big side pocket is dumping a magazine that must be retained, for instance in a tactical reload. In a match I’ll have that pocket’s cover tucked inside. Then I drop the magazine in there rather than back in a  mag pouch or my pants pocket. Should be faster….

All in all, I think this will work out, eventually, with practice and a little stiffening of the vest.

UPDATE: Big trouble….  in the picture above the big pocket is on the shooters left side, and  the AR mag pockets on the right.  My vest is reversed, making retention of magazines in the big pocket impossible.  Brian’s vest is configured as above. Phooey.