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Ocmulgee River Shoot Report, November 18th, 2006 |
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Ocmulgee River Shoot Report, November 18th, 2006 |
 | Ocmulgee River, November 18th, 2006 |
By The Rafflemeister
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The sparkling fall day that was issued to the Social Shooting Club on this 18th of November 2006 was made somber by the sad news that one of our long time members and generous supporters, Mitch Powell, had died the day before. At lunch, Bert spoke eloquently and movingly of Mitch as a concerned citizen who was very much involved in the betterment of his community. I knew him best as a jovial squad mate and an ardent lover of classic side by side shotguns. Unlike a lot of us, however, Mitch did not view fine English bird guns as trinkets fit only to decorate the walls of his den nor did he see them as mere artifacts of a bygone era. He actually shot his side by sides, and he shot them better than most of us shoot our dedicated sporting clay shotguns. One never knew whether he would show up at the range with a Purdy, a Holland, a Boss or a McNabb, but one could be pretty sure that whatever he carried into the field would be sleek of line, long of barrel and tight of choke. It would also, of course, possess lushly figured English walnut taken from a tree that was probably a sapling while Lord Nelson still strode the deck of his man o' war. For all their beauty, Mitch proved that, in the right hands, these shotguns can hold their own against today's back-bored marvels-of-technology. He liked to keep his shotguns in their original configuration, so, as far as I know, he never tampered with the tight chokes of his guns that were designed for driven game, nor did he have the chambers lengthened on the ones that were made to shoot 2 1/2 inch cartridges. Instead, he sent for specially loaded 2 1/2 inch shells containing 28 or even 24 grams of shot. They usually displayed no markings at all and looked a little like snap caps. They got the job done, however. I remember many a target rudely transformed into a black smudge downrange of Mitch and one of his nimble little side by sides. In spite of the fact that the SSC offers a handicap to members using a side by side, I never once recall Mitch attributing a missed target to the gun. I take a little solace in the knowledge that Mitch allowed himself the pleasure of owning and shooting these fine shotguns while he was still with us instead of waiting for some nebulous time in the future. He was a fine gentleman and a classy sportsman. The community, our club, and the shotgun sports are poorer for his passing.  Station two was a true pair of quartering targets from the right. Most shooters chose to shoot the more distant target on the right first and then simply continue their gun movement past the left target and break it using a swing-through technique. Wait a minute! It didn't break! What the heck!? The above approach was a perfect formula for a score of "dead-lost" on this combination because the second bird was dropping too much to use a flat swing-through on it. You had to account for the drop or the target would sail on to land at the edge of the woods and join its many unbroken siblings.
 There was a pair of turbocharged rabbits thrown as a report pair on Station four. The targets were not far from the stand, but, man, were they hauling tail! I saw a few of these bunnies missed due to tough hops, but more often than not, the misses were caused by the difficulty some shooters encountered in trying to match their gun speed to these energetic rodents. In this case the best adjustment may have been to let the targets get well past the shooting stand and treat them as quartering shots requiring less gun movement.
 Perhaps the trickiest station of the course was station eight where both targets of a true pair were incomers. One glided in at an angle from the right and stalled out just as it came within comfortable shotgun range. The other was launched from the woods directly in front of the stand. It showed its full, black underbelly to the shooter during most of its flight and then spilled off to the left and flashed its orange rim before crashing into the brush. Almost everyone took the target on the right first. The problem was: when to shoot it. The ideal place from the standpoint of the pair was just as it began to stall. If you broke it then, you could shoot the second target while its underside was still silhouetted against the sky. As it turned out, target "A" was not so easy to kill when it began to stall because it also began to bank steeply at this point and actually transform itself from a left-to-right target to a dropping right-to-left target. After a couple of misses at the transition point, a number of frustrated shooters decided to wait even longer and shoot the first target as an edge-on dropper. As often as not, they were able to dispatch "A" using this approach, but they often sacrificed target "B" in the process, having now to pick it out of the fall leaves and snap shoot it just before it hit the ground. This was a very well-set station.
 Another sneaky pair was to be found on Station 11. This looked like the easiest true pair on the course. It was made up of two right-to-left crossers shot from station four on the skeet field. One was the regulation skeet target from the low house and the other was a weakly thrown target from a trap stationed on the grass just to the right of skeet station seven. Any experienced skeet shooter could break the low house target all day long with a load of 9's and a cylinder bore, but the trouble came with the other one. Many of us misjudged JUST HOW MUCH SLOWER this one was traveling compared to the low house bird and proceeded to give it too much lead. I made this very mistake on the first pair and was a little surprised to discover on subsequent pairs that, even though this was a crossing target, if you kept your gun moving, all you had to do was to shoot right at it. Live and learn.
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