The Social Shooting Club Meets on a Rainless, but Sweltering Alabama Day

By The Rafflemeister

It was 80 degrees at 9:00 Am while The Social Shooting Club lined up to register for their fun shoot at Circle W on May 29, 2006. By the time the morning squads straggled in for lunch at noon, the mercury had risen into the nineties. Even by Alabama standards, that’s hot for May. Although I had brought five extra boxes of shells with me and there were openings in the afternoon, I hopped into my air conditioned car after lunch and headed home feeling relieved that I hadn’t signed up for an afternoon spot in the oppressive heat. If the truth be told, a breeze kicked up from time to time during the morning to grant us a little relief, and in addition to that, Circle W had placed a number of stations in the shade, which afforded us a little respite from the heat.

The targets were trickier than they looked. I honestly thought that there would be almost as many nineties on this course as there had been on the Beretta course the week before at Cherokee Rose. In fact, the par was only 90 and the HOA for the day was Ronnie Futo with his 28 gauge 96. There were some technically difficult stations, but I had the impression it was those infernal “Should-a-got’s” that nibbled away at everybody’s scores.

The more difficult stations included station one, which started with a going-away target from a trap ALMOST directly in front of the shooting stand followed by a longish quartering target thrown from a trap placed up a slope about twenty yards away to the shooter’s left. That second target would have been a lot easier had it not been for the oak tree that stood between the shooter and a decent view of the clay. You couldn’t reliably see it come off the trap arm no matter how quickly you shifted your eyes from the first target, so you had to wait until it appeared from behind the tree trunk. At this point, the target was thirty-five yards away and diving towards its break point, which was around forty yards from the stand. You had to pick the target up visually and make your move to the breakpoint in a very short window. I watched a lot of shooters, including myself, shoot this target extremely inconsistently, breaking only two or three (or even zero) out of five. The thing that surprised me the most, however, was how many shooters registered zeros on the first target of the pair. I watched shooter after shooter either rush this target unnecessarily or simply read the quartering angle as being sharper than it was. If you shot directly at this bird with a moving gun, it was stone dead every time, but I saw a lot of shooters miss in front of this one because they were trying to do too much with it.

Station two was one of those stations where you were shooting down at the targets over water. What is it about water that makes so many shooters misjudge otherwise straightforward presentations? One thing, of course, is that you can see where your pattern hits the water after a miss and it always looks like you missed behind the target no matter where you actually missed. Spectators make this mistake as well and are always shouting, “You’re behind it!” even if you actually missed six feet in front.

Another technically difficult station was station ten, I believe, with its lazy crosser that swept in from far to the shooter’s right, passed behind a tree, and settled into the little stream bed on the lower portion of the course. This target was pretty straightforward as long as you remembered to hold a little below it before releasing the shot. The second target was the problem. It was launched from the shooters right, but it was not visible until it emerged from the leaf canopy that stretches over the stream bed. Funny thing: trees like water. Anyway, the target was hard to pick up, especially for anyone who has the slightest bit of color blindness. There was a point where the target was starkly silhouetted against the sky, but by that time, it was doing all kinds of naughty stuff, the main one being dropping like a water balloon from a frat house balcony. It was also a long way away at this point and would have benefited from a wee more choke than the first one called for.

Station four was one of the best designed stations I have seen at any SSC shoot. It simply consisted of two standard targets launched from the same arm of a manual trap. The birds were 90 degree, left-to-right crossers that were traveling a little slower than a regular skeet target. You could see them come off the trap arm, but you had to take your first shot in a tight window as the birds emerged from behind one low, leafy tree, but before they disappeared again behind another. In flight, the targets were close together, but not so close you could confidently “flock shoot” them. I observed an awful lot of “field goals” as the meat hunters among us tried to break both birds with one shot and ended up missing both. I watched one shooter who got so frustrated by missing with the first shot that he ultimately tried to shoot both birds after they had passed the second tree. I don’t think it counts when you attempt to shoot a target after it has already hit the ground. Of course, the way to shoot this station was to pick out ONE target to break between the trees. If you broke both of them (which happened pretty often) so much the better, but if not, you needed to be ready to take the remaining target as it emerged from behind the second tree. A really good station!

Budweiser took time out from his Shootmeister duties to register an 87 to win three tickets in Division Two. Don Wallen’s 93 was good enough for high gun in Division Three. Imagine Dennis Sweat’s surprise when he found out that his 91 was only good enough for Division Three runner up! Division Three is a tough division. On this particular day, the first four shooters registered scores good enough to win Division Two! The Rafflemeister thought he had a pretty good day until he saw that his 86 merely put him in the middle of the pack of single-ticket winners.

Boone Butler, with his sixteen handicap, registered an amazing 92 to win Division Four followed by David Thompson’s 87. The scores finally returned to earth in Division Five, which was won by Kenneth Headrick with a respectable 78.

Joan Smith had an excellent outing with her tiny twenty gauge over and under with its stock so truncated that it seems to barely extend past the pistol grip. She won Division Six with a strong 68. And, finally, everybody in Division Seven had a good day and won a raffle ticket.