Making it easier by making it harder
by Terry Wieland
A few months ago, some lads and lassies at the club where I shoot trap and Skeet began training for an international Skeet match. The machines on one of the fields were adjusted to fling clays for them at international speed, which is about 15 per cent faster than the American game.
For one reason and another — mainly a declining demand for Skeet shooting — the machines were not put back to normal for several weeks. Several of us took to shooting on that field with its faster birds, for novelty more than anything, approaching it exactly as we would a standard Skeet field.
After a few days, a strange thing happened: We became accustomed to the higher speeds, forgot all about it, and our Skeet scores settled back to about what we would expect on a standard field. When we did go back to the American game, the birds seemed vastly bigger, slower, and easier to hit, and scores improved, temporarily at least.
This phenomenon is more psychological than physical, but psychology plays a huge part in any shotgun game, particularly in trap, and there I have noticed something similar. A good way to train for standard 16-yard trap is to move back to 19 or even 22 yards and shoot from there as a regular practice.
Shooting from the full handicap 27-yard line is dramatically different than from 16 yards. Twenty-seven yards seems like a completely different game, with the birds appearing way off in the distance. From 19, however, they are just a little farther and a little smaller; you quickly get used to shooting from there and see nothing unusual until you go back to 16 yards where, suddenly, the clays are as big as dinner plates and float like drifting feathers.
Here is yet another example, this one involving standard American Skeet. A couple of years ago I was getting ready for a pigeon match and decided, for a few months, to shoot nothing but my pigeon gun. This included Skeet, for which that gun — a W&C Scott Monte Carlo ‘B,’ with 30-inch barrels, choked Full & Full — is, by normal standards, completely unsuitable.
At first, I either turned Skeet birds to dust or missed altogether. Gradually, though, I forgot all about chokes and the gun I was using, and found myself expecting to score what I would normally would.
I am not, and never have been, a serious Skeet shooter, preferring trap for its formality and discipline, and the fascination of dedicated and deadly trap guns. Anyway, I just never took Skeet all that seriously, shooting it only occasionally and with my best scores running in the low twenties.
With the pigeon gun, I was shooting 12s at first, then 15s, then the odd 19 or 20. Gradually, I completely forgot about the gun I was using and its tight chokes. My mind returned to its standard Skeet mindset. I expected to shoot better scores and, miracle of miracles, there they were.
With this in mind, when I acquired a lovely 28-gauge over/under from Connecticut Shotgun Mfg. Co. (CSMC) recently, I began practicing with tighter chokes than I would normally use. The standard 28-gauge load is ¾ ounce at about 1,200 feet per second. That is the load with which the 28 made its reputation — effective out of all proportion — but to get the full impact you need to keep that ¾ ounce of shot bunched together. A Modified or Improved Modified choke will do that.
You get some odd looks when you show up on a Skeet field with a tightly choked gun. Inevitably, someone will ask what chokes you’re using and, just as inevitably, someone will chime in with the line “No, no! Your chokes are way too tight. What you need is…” Which, I guess, is well-meaning, except that my goal in being on that field at that time is not to dust as many clays as possible, but to become as proficient as possible with that particular gun.
This all works on the same principle as, if you want to run a fast five-miler, train at ten miles: You work on something harder to make the shorter distance easier.
To get back to shooting, of the three current disciplines, Skeet is, in my opinion, the most commonly accessible and also the best for training for hunting. Trap is too set-piece and most Sporting Clays courses have too many stations that are gimmicky or unrealistic; a Skeet range gives you all the variety you really need. It just takes a little imagination.
Gray’s shooting editor Terry Wieland is finding himself, to his horror, actually enjoying shooting Skeet.
