Shoot Report - Year End Party May 20, 2006

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The Social Shooting Club 2005 Season Year End Shoot and Banquet

By The Rafflemeister

The famous Social Shooting Club weather luck held for the 2005 Year End Shoot and Banquet (held in 2006). The day was sunny and breezy and in the low eighties at midday and cooled off nicely for the banquet, awards ceremony, and raffle in the evening.

Cherokee Rose Shooting Resort provided two courses of vastly different degrees of difficulty. The Promatic course was much the easier set-up but had enough variation to keep it interesting. The variation was enhanced by the effects of the gusty winds, so you did have to keep on your toes to avoid missing targets that took a sudden hop or dip that was not usual for the presentation. Station eight started with what looked like a straight outgoer thrown from a trap only a couple of yards in front of the stand and was followed, on report, by a lazy, looping target that drifted in from the woods. The second target looked like the more technically difficult of the two, but on my squad, it was the outgoer that gave some of us trouble. It only appeared to be traveling straight away from the shooter. In fact, it was rising just enough in the first half of its flight to assess a miss on anyone who tried to spot-shoot it before it reached the top of its trajectory. The other thing that happened with this presentation was that, occasionally, the wind would get under the target and lift it into the air like a Messerschmitt trying to shake a Spitfire. This happened to me on one pair and I almost tore a tendon in my trigger finger trying to hold back the shot until the target finally settled down. Through blind luck, I managed to break it as it finally dove into the woods at about forty yards. Station twelve featured a couple of incomers that gave shooters plenty of time to think themselves into doing something stupid. A lot of shooters broke all but one of these targets, but one target on this course could be big!

The par of 97 for the Promatic course was the highest in the history of the SSC. Ronnie Futo, the Division one winner with a 28 Gauge 99, had to share top gun honors with Paul Ashley and Mike Highnote of Division two and with Jeff Arneson in division three!

John Persall and Millard Ross shared top gun in Division four with matching 98’s. Yes, you read that correctly; I am talking about Division FOUR! These guys used to have a 16 and a 15 handicap!! Well, tough luck guys, welcome to Division three. Vance Gafnea won Division five with his 89 and Steve Rusmisell was high man in Division six with a strong 85. Four out of the five shooters in Division seven scored well enough to win a raffle ticket. Melinda Bozeman’s 71 was sixteen targets above her handicap! Well, no more “nicey-nice”, Melinda. From now on, it’s ruthless, vicious, brutal, take-no-prisoners, head-to-head, Division six competition.

The Beretta course, though not as tough as last year’s humbling setup, was definitely of tournament quality and included some really interesting combinations. My favorite was the fur and feather combination on station five. This station consisted of a really long, crossing rabbit followed by a quartering bird at almost the same distance. This combination called for plenty of choke to be sure of a kill, as the break point for both targets was around 45 yards. I watched a few hopeful participants leave their IC chokes in for this combination. Their pattern kicked up a cloud of dust the size of a banquet table at this distance, and on more than one occasion, I watched the bunny emerge unbroken although it seemed to have been centered in the pattern. This was by no means a scientific test, but if this target didn’t call for a full choke, I don’t know why manufacturers even bother to offer them sale.

Station seven, I think it was, was set in a shaded glade and consisted of a pair of quartering targets thrown from the left. The first target was blisteringly fast and was difficult for many of us to pick up in the mottled light filtering through the trees. The second bird was a little closer and a lot slower. The two targets called for completely different gun speeds, so that even if you managed to pick up and kill the first one, you had a good chance of either blasting past the second one or perceiving it as too much of a floater and stopping the gun. I fell victim to the first scenario and shot in front of it on the first pair.

Station three was a puzzling station for my squad. It really looked easy and straight forward, but we managed to mess it up in every way possible. It was a true pair thrown from high atop a futuristic crane located up the slope about twenty yards to the left of the shooter. The two targets were only of slightly different speeds and the full underbellies of the clays were visible throughout most of their flight. It seemed like you could simply screw in a couple of skeet chokes and turn both of these targets into balls of smoke before they had a chance to do anything funky. Yes, they were a little hard to pick up quickly before they emerged from the leafy background, I guess it was not immediately obvious which target to take first, and I suppose it was a somewhat awkward gun position, but these are just the kind of traps that experience shooters should be able to recognize and avoid. NOT! I can’t remember seeing so many field goals outside of a basketball game! There was, in fact, an artistic symmetry to the way the shot and wad passed so often directly between the two targets so starkly silhouetted against the azure sky.

Not everybody was fooled, of course, as is evidenced by the course par of 92 and the pair of 96’s registered by Kevin DeMichiel and Vince McGreggor who tied for HOA and Division one champion on Beretta. Buddies, Miles and Newberry tied for first in Division two with amazing 94’s which would have given them a tie for second in Division one! It is interesting to note that Buddy Newberry broke three targets MORE on Beretta than he did on Promatic. Division three was won by Chad Sullivan with a 91 and Bill Smith logged in a great performance to win Division four with an 86. Johnny Darnell managed to nose out Harvey Shelnutt by one target to earn three tickets in division five with a solid 80. Myrl Miller left the other Division six shooters in the dust with a very solid 76. Laura Brandeburg and Patsy Alston shot way above their handicaps to win tickets in Division seven.

The top gun shoot off for The Social Shooting Club’s 2005 season was held at 3:15 on the skeet/FITASC field in front of the Cherokee Rose clubhouse. The zero handicap shooters who participated were Kevin DeMicheil, Vince McGreggor, Gary Pyron, and Alex Sumner. All four shooters managed to break an amazing number of very long and difficult presentations, but when the smoke had cleared and the last clay shards had tumbled from the sky, Vince McGreggor had successfully defended his 2004 top gun title and was once again awarded the trophy for SSC top gun.