Whenever I start thinking I'm pretty salty with a shotgun, a round of sporting clays puts my feet back on the ground.
The most recent reality slap occurred Wednesday during a round of clays at Blue Rock Gun Club with Joe Volpe of Little Rock, his son John Volpe and Anne Marie Doramus. Joe Volpe said it would be wise for us to sharpen our shotgunning skills with wingshooting seasons approaching. They start Sept. 1 with the opening of the Canada goose season, followed by the opening of dove season on Sept. 3. Early teal season opens Sept. 16. There will also be a South Dakota pheasant hunt in early October.
For Volpe, these are all just warmup acts for the opening of white-fronted goose season on Oct. 29. Volpe is an ardent predator of specklebelly geese, and he is known for the hunts he organizes with friends and colleagues. One of the regulars is Shawn Tobin, who can never make up his mind about what ammunition to use, so he brings everything he owns. It's quite a haul to shoot just three geese, the daily bag limit, but he is always assured of having a cartridge for all occasions. He attend the sporting clays shoot, but we wished he had.
Of course, it has been a minute since any of us used a shotgun, so we were eager to flex our muscles. It wasn't a competitive round, so we played loose with the rules. The objective was to hit more than we missed.
If you haven't shot in a while, sporting clays might not be the best way to knock off the rust. Unlike skeet and trap, which are repetitive muscle memory games, sporting clays offers targets in just about every presentation imaginable. Some stations feature report pairs, which means the trapper releases the second target as soon as the shooter fires at the first target. Other stations feature true pairs, which means the trapper releases two targets simultaneously.
At each station, shooters always get to look at the targets before shooting. Some targets cross, but almost never on parallel paths. One target might cross directly in front of the shooter, but the second target might go away or fly toward you. You have to decide which target to shoot first, but you also have to know exactly when to shoot.
Timing is important because some of the traps are located almost at the edge of the effective range for a skeet choke. If that target launches going away, you might not pick it up until it is in range for an improved cylinder choke or even a modified choke. If you shoot an over/under shotgun, a solution might be to have an open constriction choke tube in one barrel and a tighter constriction tube in the second barrel. That's often not practical because some stations require two long shots. Others require close shots where tighter chokes are liabilities.
One of the nastiest presentations we saw Wednesday was a bumblebee size target that started at the edge of skeet choke range. It comes out from behind a tree, so when you can lock onto it and get a lead, it's almost out of range. The second target comes at you from the woods. It's a slow, looping target that should be really easy to it.
Curiously, I consistently broke the bumblebee, but I always missed the easy "bird."
Rabbit targets confound me. A "rabbit" rolls along the ground. It might roll unimpeded, but it might hit something that makes it bounce in the air. Big and slow, it should be easy to hit, but I usually shoot the ground in front of it.
Doramus, with her Beretta Silver Pigeon over/under and Beretta A400 autoloader, usually hits the rabbits.
I, with a Winchester 101 12-gauge and a Weatherby Athena 20-gauge, consistently make hard shots and miss the easy ones.
Summer heat factors into sporting clays success, too. We started shooting at about 6:30 p.m. The hard edge of the day's heat had dulled somewhat, but by Station 4, sweat poured into my eyes and down my cheeks.
I am a respectable skeet shooter and consider myself decent at trap, but I am not good at sporting clays. It's a different game and a different discipline than the other two, but every time I stink up a course, I am determined to get better.
One of these days I will.