Reload, fire, reload, fire

It’s been hectic. After coming back from holiday we had less than a day at home before we had to rush off to a stag weekend down south. The groom to be is my brother-in-law and the best man is to be my good lady. I suppose that little fact could be seen as confirming our credentials as new liberals who don’t hold with tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth which is that I am too frightened of Mrs. England Project to make an attempt at preventing this particular attack on the foundations that hold up this great country of ours.

Anyhow, to the point. This is a posting about shooting. With guns.

The stag was a day of events finished off with a large dose of extreme drinking. One of these events was a clay pigeon shoot and it was during this particular event that I had the pleasure of taking part in a couple of clay formats that I had not seen before.

Effectively there were two shooting points each containing a shooter (murderous and evil user of a deadly and easily converted into a machine gun shotgun user) and a scorer/loader. The single trap (thing that fires off clays) was placed far ahead of the shooting points and, on command, it would put two clays into the air simultaneously with one clay flying approximately towards each shooter. The idea was to break your own clay and then attempt to break your opponents clay.

What fun. The temptation to snap at the first clay was almost overwhelming because the longer you took to take the shot the more likely it was that your opponent would shoot your target out from underneath you.

The second interesting format also involved two shooters but this time the targets were rabbits. For those that don’t know these are clays that are rolled down an incline (in this instance from right to left). It’s an interesting discipline because the clays tend to jump off the ground at every bumpy opportunity sometimes to a height of a couple of yards or so. I’ve shot rabbits before but the particularly interesting thing about this format was the rapidity that they clays came out of the trap.

The trap operator was asked to fire 15 clays at his own discretion (as fast or as slow as he liked) which effectively meant as fast as he could load them into the trap. Meanwhile the two shooters were tasked with taking any clay at any time in any order whilst quickly breaking his/her barrels to allow the loader/scorer to replace the spent cartridges. It made for what seemed like a very brief spell of furious activity at the end of which each shooter was standing in an impossible pile of spent cartridges viewing a scene of orange rabbit armageddon.

Great fun and, if you run a shoot of your own, thoroughly recommended.