While new shooters flock to sporting clays courses in ever-greater numbers these days, trap and skeet find themselves accused of Monotony and Irrelevance in the First Degree. Nothing more than mind-numbing, dour exercises in groove-shooting perfection, their critics say, and little benefit as anything but practice for themselves.
I beg to differ.
In defense of trap and skeet, allow me to introduce into evidence Exhibit One, a mallard drake, 30 yards out, high above the cypress tops, climbing straight up and carrying two or three pellets of someone else's steel. The duck was going up, not away, but the angle was identical to a right-quartering target from Post 4 on the trap field. My mind registered the similarity and muscle memory took over. The duck crumpled, my host allowed as it was the highest mallard he'd seen killed in 50 years of hunting, and I was temporarily famous in Wynne, Arkansas.
Let me direct your attention now to Exhibit Two, the trophy case of George Digweed. The English shooter routinely terrorizes sporting clays events on both sides of the Atlantic, but you'll see plenty of loving cups won on the skeet field mixed in with his sporting trophies. Digweed, it seems, shot only skeet before taking up and dominating sporting clays. Obviously he learned a thing or two about swinging a shotgun on the skeet field.
Between the trap and skeet fields, you will see virtually every angle you'll ever encounter in the field or on the sporting course. A round of trap or skeet costs much less than a round of sporting clays and takes only 15 minutes to shoot. If your club has lights, you can play both games long after dark.
Rather than dismiss trap and skeet as "predictable," look at them as games that eliminate variables and focus your concentration on the fundamentals. You may know the angles on a skeet field in advance, but you still have to swing the gun and lead the target.
Trap teaches target acquisition and precise pointing at out-going clays while punishing head-lifters mercilessly. Both games will make you a better all-around shot. In fact, many English sporting instructors like to teach the basics on a skeet field before moving on to the sporting course.
Yeah, but trap and skeet are no fun, right? Not at the tournament level, maybe, but tournaments aren't about fun, no matter what the game. You'll never hear more whoops and hollers at a gun club than when trapshooters line up to shoot an Annie Oakley. The skeet field is rarely the scene of such hilarity, but it's a great place to enjoy a small-gauge bird gun that can't handle a full-size sporting course.
What about all those "monotonous straights"? Trust me, few of us will ever shoot either game well enough to become bored by our scores.
Here's a short course on trap and skeet.
Skeet
Skeet was born in Massachusetts in the 1915, when grouse hunter Charles Davis invented a game he called "shooting around the clock" to improve his wingshooting. He put a portable trap on the ground at six o'clock on an imaginary clock face 25 yards across and shot targets from each "hour." Skeet lore has it that the neighboring landowner objected to the patter of shot on his chicken house roof, so Davis cut the circle in half and added a second trap facing the first.
Outdoor writer William Harndon Foster played the game with Davis and wrote about it often. "Clock shooting" caught on quickly and became extremely popular. The name "skeet" (a Scandinavian word for "shoot") was coined during a contest to re-name "Shooting Around the Clock".
During the Second World War, aerial gunners took skeet training to learn how to lead targets and after the war ended, these gunners came home and bought skeet guns. Skeet was originally shot from the low gun, but in the 1950s the National Skeet Shooting Association did away with the low gun start and the variable three-second delay, ushering in the era of perfect scores and endless shoot-offs.
The Game
The targets emerge from a high house (10 feet above ground) on the left and a low house (3-1/2 feet above ground) on the right that face one another 40 yards apart. Legal skeet targets travel between 60 and 70 yards and pass 15 feet above a crossing stake set 21 yards from the shooting stations, which are arranged around an arc running from one house to the other.
A round of skeet consists of 25 shots, beginning with a high-house bird at station one, then a low house bird, then a double at one, two, six, and seven.
You shoot high and low birds beginning at station one (which is right in front of the high house) and proceed on through eight, always shooting the high house target first. To make a round of 25, you shoot an "optional," either immediately repeating your first lost bird, or, if you don't miss, shooting the last station--low 8--twice.
Skeet Tips
If you decide to get serious about shooting good skeet scores for their own sake, you'll imitate the tournament shooters who use a mounted gun, a sustained lead system, and calculate their forward allowance to the millimeter. Many top shooters time their swing with their call and break targets automatically.
Champion shooter Fred Missildine is said to have actually hit skeet targets blindfolded that way. You'll get better practice, however, shooting skeet with a low gun and using whatever system--pull-away, move-mount-shoot, swing-through--you like for sporting clays. Try to take the outgoing targets as near the center stake as possible but let the incomers to cross it.
Aim your feet past the point where you want to break the target to assist your follow-through, just as you would on a sporting clays station. With most skeet stations you can take the high and low birds without shifting your stance between shots. Many shooters, however, move their feet slightly between birds at stations three and five, which are pure 90-degree crossers. By shifting your feet in favor of more follow-through on each bird, you'll have an easier time dealing with these stations, which demand the longest leads on the field.
In skeet doubles, a high and low house bird are launched simultaneously and fly right at one another. You have to shoot one target, then swing back in the opposite direction to catch the other. Skeet doubles are invaluable teachers of the bedrock rule of all doubles shooting: watch the first target break.
At all four stations, you shoot the outgoing target first. Make sure of it, and don't panic if you lose track of the second bird; simply look up and to your left at stations one and two, to your right at six and seven, and you'll find it.
The real trick shot in skeet is station eight, where you stand out near the target crossing stake and shoot birds screaming virtually right over your head. Beginners fear and miss station eight until they learn that it's the easiest bird on the field. Then they love vaporizing the target a few feet from their gun muzzle.
Rather than try to break station eight over your head with a pattern the size of a golf ball, hold even with, and to the outside of, the trap opening, so you have a good view of the target the instant it appears. Then swing up to blot out the bird as soon as it emerges. That way, you'll have the advantage of a larger pattern spread to work with and the shot becomes that much easier.
Equipment
Skeet is a short-range game. Most skeet targets are broken within 25e yards, and many are taken at half that distance. You break low 8 at four yards. A skeet choke is ideal, cylinder and IC will both do.
For years, skeet guns had 26-inch barrels, period. In recent times, thanks in part to the lessons learned by sporting clays shooters, skeet barrels have grown to 28 and 30 inches. Most skeet targets are falling slightly by the time you shoot, so a gun that hits dead on works better than a high-shooting gun. Most sporting guns will work perfectly fine for skeet shooting.
Size 9 shot is the standard skeet pellet, but there's no law against shooting the 8s or 8-1/2s you load for sporting clays. You'll find, too, that an ounce of shot is more than enough for skeet, and even the 3/4 ounce 28-gauge load will shatter targets impressively.
Trap
Trap's origins date to the English live pigeon shoots of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although shooting pigeons released from "traps" (actually boxes or top hats) grew to be extremely popular with shooters on both sides of the Atlantic, the cost and controversy of using live targets prompted a search for an inanimate substitute.
Inventive shooters tried glass balls full of feathers, tin birds, even exploding targets, until George Ligowsky of Cincinnati made the first "clay pigeon."
As live bird shooting declined, trap shooting as we know it rose in popularity around the turn of the century. Today trap is thriving, as anyone who's attended the huge Grand American Handicap at the ATA's mile-long grounds in Vandalia, Ohio, can attest.
The Game
A round of trap consists of 25 shots, five each from five stations or posts in an arc beginning 16 yards behind the trap house. After five shots at one station, you move to the next station at the puller's command of "walk."
The gun is shouldered, and the target released immediately on the gunner's command of "pull." An oscillating trap throws targets at an unknown angle within an arc of 44 degrees. The target must travel a minimum of 48 yards, no more than 52, and it must rise between 6 and 12 feet 10 yards in front of the house.
Tournament shooters are handicapped according to their average and must compete at varying distances from 16 to 27 yards behind the house.
Trap Tips
New shooters need to know where to hold the gun as they call for their bird. Two-eyed shooters should start with a hold one or two feet above the house. They can look down "through" the barrel and see the target emerge from the trap. One-eyed shooters, on the other hand, will find such a hold blocks their view of the target, and often need to hold right down on the roof.
The standard advice on gun position for the five posts runs as follows: from station one, at the far left, hold above the left corner of the house and at five on the far right, hold over the right corner. At two and four split the difference between the center and the corner. At three, hold a few inches off the center, so you can still see the target emerge.
Another school suggests holding on the middle of the house and down near the roof from all five posts. This hold promotes a faster swing, since you start farther behind the bird. It also puts you in position to shoot the straightaway targets by simply raising the gun.
The advantage of a center hold is that it makes the deceptively difficult gentle angles easy to read and break. Many shooters who hold off the house to anticipate hard angles misread gentle quartering angles as straightaways and shoot behind them, or overswing as they react back towards the middle to cover a straightaway. You'll have to experiment with both methods until you find a hold position that suits you well.
Developing consistent timing is a key to good trap shooting. You need to be quick but deliberate to score well. Sporting shooters I've watched at their first try at trap tend to jump too quickly on their targets. Trap's cardinal sin is moving the muzzle before you've read the target angle. First, track the bird with your eyes, then swing quickly past the target and break it. Don't ride your birds; the farther away they get, the slower they spin and the harder they are to break.
Trap is truly a game of inches. I once saw a video in which All-American Kay Ohye stood at station five, swinging at hard right-angle targets. He'd suspended a ruler next to the gun muzzle and the barrel moved no more than a foot even on the widest angle on the field. Small errors in pointing cost you trap targets, especially on the straightaways.
The old saying "Trap shooters fear the angles and miss the straightaways" rings very true. The angles, which seem to sling sideways out of the trap, frighten and preoccupy trap shooters (although new shooters coming to the game from sporting clays break them confidently).
In reality, once you learn not to be afraid of angles, they're easier than straightaways--they're closer, look bigger, and it's easy to judge their height. Straightaways, on the other hand, present just a slice of an edge-on look and are frustratingly easy to shoot over or under.
While trap targets are often described as steeply rising, don't jump to the conclusion that you're missing targets underneath. You'll often shoot over the top when you're learning the game. Beginners shoot slowly, and many times don't take their targets until they've topped out or even begun to fall.
Equipment
Can you shoot trap with a sporting gun? Not well enough to win the Grand, maybe, but well enough to enjoy the game. Trap guns are long-barreled-- 30 or 32 inches--just like most sporting guns these days. A trap gun will probably be heavier in the muzzle than you're used to, but I've seen shooters turn in good scores with 30-inch barreled sporting guns with modified, IM or full tubes screwed in.
Most trap guns shoot high and many good shooters "float" their birds over the rib. With a lower-shooting gun like most sporting models, you have to blot your targets to break them. You may shoot better if you modify your sporting gun to shoot a little higher. Add some moleskin or a leather lace-on pad to the comb and you'll get the same sight picture a trapshooter sees over a Monte Carlo.
Trapshooters feel recoil more than do skeet or sporting clays shooters, perhaps because the gun is premounted and moved very little, or because shots follow one another in such quick succession. You can cut the kick of your gun significantly by shooting one-ounce loads of 7-1/2s, 8s, or 8-1/2s, which still have plenty of pellets to crush 16-yard targets.
Does trap help your sporting clays? Not so much as skeet, frankly, but it's a good place to work on your long-range, outgoing targets, especially if you try it from your regular low-gun position. Even with a premounted gun, however, trap makes good practice for upland shooters who take their birds going away.
And, if you want to become the day's topic of conversation in a small corner of Arkansas, trapshooting, in my experience, is downright essential.
Copyright (c) 1997 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.
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