Sunday, July 16, 2017

Clay pigeon (skeet) shooting: giving it a go


Many moons ago, I used to enjoy target shooting, mainly with long guns, but occasionally with handguns as well. Now, sadly, after the banning of most types of firearm in the UK following various shooting incidents, I have to settle for getting a bit of practice every now and again on trips to the States.

One type of firearm that is still legal in the UK is a shotgun, despite it being so beloved of bank robbers of yore, when the barrel or barrels would be sawn off for ease of concealment.


Doing this does have a number of drawbacks, such as decreasing the velocity and accuracy of the projectile, and wildly increasing both the spread of the shot and the recoil. There’s even a scene in a 2012 Brad Pitt movie, Killing Them Softly, where a shotgun used in a robbery has been sawn off so short you can see the ends of the cartridges protruding from what little there is left of the barrels.


Back when I was target shooting with rifle, I was advised not to fire shotguns, as this would alter my technique. Shooting a rifle is much more about stillness, about taking up a position that allows you to relax and still be aiming correctly at the target. Using a shotgun is all about trying to hit a moving target, so you’re anticipating where the target is going to be, rather than where it is now. 

But, as I haven’t done any competition shooting for many years, there was no excuse not to finally give shotgun a try. For this I went to Cloudside Shooting Grounds near Congleton in Cheshire for a taster session.

Photo: Cloudside

The club has a fantastic setting overlooking the rolling countryside, although my eye was more on the flying orange and black discs than it was on the view. After a bacon butty in the temporary clubhouse marquee – apparently they had a chimney fire in the clubhouse proper – I was handed a box of 20 gauge shotgun shells and led to the first of the stands to give it a whirl.

Photo: Cloudside

The different stands had controllers for the various traps, involving the clays either going directly away from the shooting position, directly towards, or off at angles. The final one was a long left-to-right trajectory that apparently classes as ‘difficult’.

What surprised me was the almost total lack of recoil from the 20 gauge shotgun. I’d been half expecting a bruised shoulder, but there was nothing to cause it. And as long as you keep your cheek resting lightly on the comb of the stock rather than pressed hard against it, nothing to worry your face, either.

Photo: Cloudside

Getting my head round the slow velocity of the shot took a bit of doing, but tracking ahead of the clay and waiting for it to fall into my sight picture was not as difficult as I’d been expecting.

As for how many did I hit? Enough for a decent-sized clay pigeon pie, let me put it that way!


And will I be giving clay shooting another try? Very probably …

This week’s Word of the Week is skeet, which is the US name for clay pigeon, but which also has a number of slang definitions, such as something that’s generally displeasing, or displeasing due to being insufficient. It’s a type of poker hand as well, also known as a freak or nonstandard hand, which is generally considered an unpaired hand with three cards including the 2, 7, and 9, and three cards in between. And finally, it’s the slang term for a method of birth control. I’ll leave the mechanics of that to your imaginations!


6 comments:

  1. "bacon butty"??? I hesitate to ask...

    Skeet? Birth control? Eeek.

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    1. Well, yes, apart from the accepted slang definition, I could imagine that holding a shotgun would be a pretty good way of avoiding unwanted pregnancy ...

      A bacon butty is merely a substantial sandwich with bacon in the middle of it. :-)

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  2. Zoe, my dad taught me to fire a rifle, but I never liked it much--perhaps because the first time I tried it, I was attacked by a cloud of mosquitoes. "You have to relax into it, Sweetie," he kept saying. NOT possible. Another similar word to "skeet" is "skeeters," American slang for mosquitoes. You see, there actually was a point to my story.

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    1. Ah-ha, Annamaria, you've come up with one definition that didn't show up in my searches! Not easy to relax into anything while being bitten by mozzies, I would have thought. Nasty.

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  3. Ahh, yes guns, one of my passions. But as always I learn more about my desires via you. Uhh, not sure how that sounded, but let's proceed.

    I'd never heard to avoid the shotgun sports--whether skeet, trap or sporting clays--if you wished to excel with the rifle. but it makes sense when you think about it. As you know, with a rifle (or handgun) you focus on the front sight, not the target, and squeeze the trigger, BUT with the shotgun you focus on the target and slap the trigger, so for the serious target shooter the habits of one sport could affect performance in the other.

    At the moment though, my shooting efforts here in Greece are confined to bug spray aimed at relatives of Annamaria's mosquitoes.

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    1. Good explanation of the difference in the two disciplines, Jeff. And yes, it was so I didn't start snapping off shots rather than carefully aiming, although I found the former technique worked very well for moving target shoots.

      I was bitten by horse flies last weekend, which are as horrible as mozzies on any continent. I always come up in huge lumps and have to take antihistamines, which tend to put me to sleep. Never a good combination.

      I found the biggest problem in Greece was wasps, although setting fire to a small amount of coffee in an ashtray or similar dish worked surprisingly well at keeping them at bay.

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