Calloway Gardens Shoot Report, January 14th, 2007

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Callaway Cardens Gun Club, January 14th, 2007

By The Rafflemeister

I'm sorry to report that we have lost yet another loyal member of The Social Shooting Club. Even as our club members mourn, clay pigeons everywhere must be rejoicing at the passing of Chris Brown because, when Chris was in the vicinity, the life of a clay target tended to be short and violent. Chris spent much of his shotgun career as a competitive skeet shooter and once earned the title of US National Champion in the .410 bore. He was also inducted into the Georgia Skeet Shooting Hall of Fame in 1992. Unlike many skeet shooters, however, Chris seemed to have little trouble making the transition to the greater target variation found in the discipline of sporting clays. He spent the majority of his nearly ten-year association with The Social Shooting Club as a Division One shooter, and as I look over his detailed member stats, I see that he was able to win that division no fewer than six times, which includes two occasions where he registered back-to-back wins in consecutive events. Add to that the sixteen times he was able to turn in a score of ninety or above (including one 99) and you cannot but conclude that he was a true master of the smoothbore. In addition to his awesome ability with a shotgun, Chris Brown was a fine gentleman and he always conducted himself with dignity and was never heard to utter a disparaging word about anybody. Considering his many accomplishments, we should consider it an honor that he chose to become a member of our humble shooting family. Our club will be decidedly poorer for his loss. The Social Shooting Club was greeted by shirt sleeve weather on this January 14, 2007 at Callaway Gardens Gun Club. I didn't get any pictures of the shoot this week because the heavy cloud cover didn't provide enough light for clear action shots during the morning flight. I am also using the dim light as my excuse for the ignominious 77 I registered on this balmy January day. The 14 station course was set using a mixture of manual and automatic traps and included a lot of cleverly set pairs where it wasn't obvious which target to take first. There were many quick, close presentations interspersed with a few longer more technically challenging pairs. There were only a few occasions where anything tighter than skeet choke was needed for a particular target. Most of the menus consisted of a mixture of report and true pairs, and much of the time, the true pairs had to be approached completely differently from the report pairs. This was particularly true on station two, which started with a close crosser throw slightly toward the shooter from the far end of an alley cut in the woods followed by a downwardly angled target that originated from over the shooter's right shoulder. Most shooters shot the first target of the report after it had passed the shooting stand and was moving away from the gun. This worked fine on the report pair, but if you waited that long to break target number one on the true pair, target number two was almost in the brush by the time you could locate it and snap off a quick shot. On the true pair, the trick was to take the first target as an incomer before it ever reached the stand because you then had plenty of time to find and kill the second one. The menu on station three was just three true pairs. This station was shot from a tall metal platform, so you were shooting down at both targets. The target that most of us attempted first was a truly sinister rabbit that bounced along normally before it plunged off a ledge like a plate rolling off a table. Unfortunately, it rolled off the table right at the spot that most of us chose as the break point. I watched shooter after shooter simply follow the bounding rabbit just like it were traveling along a continuously level surface and allow it to drop below the gun barrel right at the moment of the shot. The second target was a smartly moving crosser launched from nearly the same location as the rabbit. The bird looked like the more difficult of the two targets, but it was the rabbit that gave most of us fits. By the time you realized what you were doing wrong on the bunny, you were on your last pair at best. Station five offered a fast outgoer thrown from in front and just to the left of the shooting stand paired with a long crosser launched from far to the shooter's left. This was not a tricky combination, but did require precision and a good, smooth swing. It was also one of the few pairs where there really wasn't much difference between the approach you needed to take on the report pairs and the true pairs, the main difference being that you shot the crosser as a rising target on the report pair and as a falling target on the true. The outgoer required almost no lead at all if you had enough gun speed, whereas the crosser needed a whole bunch of lead. The report pairs on station seven started with a high lazy target that drifted in from somewhere behind and to the shooter's right followed by a low, quick outgoer also from the right and somewhat behind the shooter. The dramatic difference in speeds of these pairs tripped up some participants, and of course, you had to shoot the true pairs in the opposite order from the report pairs. Station eight was one of the more technically difficult of the day. It consisted of a long, quartering target from the left that was really carrying the mail followed by an incomer that loped in from the far tree line and displayed its full underside to the shooter before losing all its steam and dropping into the high grass about fifteen yards in front of the cage. Most of the shooters I watched produced very inconsistent results on this station, especially on the first target of this pair, and some of them tried to get really fancy with the second one and missed that one as well. Station eleven was a truly strange pair. The first target was a right-to-left quartering bird at about shoulder height, but the second one was a weirdly angled chandelle thrown high in the air from heaven knows where off in woods. Thrown against the smoke grey sky, it was hard to judge exactly what this second target was doing apart from being rather far away and very annoying. It looked to me like the chandelle was simply dropping straight down after it peaked, so I resolved to let it start to drop and hold a little under the target and break it on the way down. Well, I tried three different leads with this approach and never managed to detach so much as a flake from the nasty thing. It must have been the bad light. Station twelve was a pair of the dreaded going-away rabbits thrown from a single manual trap. This eye-crossing pair was an exercise in instinctive shooting. You really had to lock onto and kill whichever target came into your vision first and then worry about the second one when the time came. A few of us were lucky enough to be dealt a "house pair" on this station. Unfortunately, I missed mine with both barrels. It's amazing the effect that bad light can have on even the most unlikely pair. On this outing, the top three scores came all came from Division Two. Paul Ashley shot a phenomenal 98 on this course followed by Matt Morgan with a 92 and then by Justin Johnson, whose score of 91 would have won Division One but was only good enough for a single ticket in Division Two! Man, that's a tough crowd in Division Two! Fourth overall, but first in Division One was Ronnie Futo with a 90. Wendell Jackson won top honors in Division Three with an 89. He was closely followed by Michael Crowder and Doug Meadow who shared the number two spot with 88's. Division Four was won by Todd Brandenburgh whose 84 was one target better than the second place shooter Ed Sweat. Robby Ellis handily won Division Five with a 76. Dick Douthard, Jr secured the number two position in this Division with his 72. Tammie Ashley easily qualified for three raffle tickets in Division Six with her fine 69. In spite of the fact that Chuck Lebo couldn't get his gun to fire two shots in a row much of the time, he managed to keep his concentration and ended up in the number two spot with a 64. Three out of the four shooters in Division Seven had good enough days to bring home a raffle ticket. We were served a hearty plate of pickin' pig for lunch followed by a huge assortment of gooey, chewy desserts. I am happy to report that, in spite of the bad light, I was able to successfully guide to food to my mouth without incident. Of course, by the time lunch rolled around, the day was starting to brighten a bit. Thanks are in order to Callaway Gardens for continuing the free round drawings at their club.