From the November/December 2003 Issue of Gray's Sporting Journal


Skeet Revisited

Returning the first game-practice game to its original use.

by Terry Wieland

Good shotgun practice for gameshooting is remarkably difficult to come by in this country, which is doubly ironic when you consider the phenomenal growth of sporting clays over the past 15 years.

Sporting clays was intended by its English inventors to provide realistic practice for game shots in the off-season. Trap was seen as too specialized and skeet too predictable. And, since both were formal games, they tended to make game shooters feel unwelcome with their uncompetitive game guns. Now I fear sporting clays is going exactly the same way. Sporting guns are long and heavy, they have interchangeable chokes that get switched between stations, and there are different cartridges and loads to handle the various presentations of clays.

All this is fine if you’re into cutthroat competition and it really matters to you that your average is 82 percent while your neighbor manages only 81 percent. For those of us to whom clay birds are merely a fill-in between hunting seasons, this trend is not only unwelcome but also injurious to our practice schedules.

I have been on sporting clays courses recently where the bird presentations bear no resemblance to any game situation we’re ever likely to encounter. How many times do you take a shot at a springing teal promptly followed by a bounding rabbit? Or take consecutive 50-yard crossing shots? It seems that many course designers are now trying to install impossible presentations so club members can brag that their sporting course is more difficult than someone else’s.

Challenging birds are one thing, but when you walk off a course with a score in the mid 40s out of 100, and you feel the presentations were simply unfair, you haven’t accomplished much in terms of shot- gunning practice. And to conquer these courses shooters are forced to use guns that are the antithesis of a good game gun.

If you’re encountering this kind of problem when you shoot sporting clays and you want a way of practicing for wingshooting, I may have a solution for you: Take up skeet once again, but do so on your own terms.

Skeet fields are found all over the place and are lightly populated these days, plus you need only two people to put together the ideal team for practicing. You’ll be putting the skeet field to the use for which it was intended back in 1926, when skeet originated to provide practice for ruffed-grouse hunting.

Since the 1960s, skeet has steadily fallen from favor with game shooters for a variety of reasons.

First, it’s too predictable. Every bird at every station flies exactly the same way every time, and so once you learn the mechanics of each bird it’s possible to put together fantastic runs of consecutive breaks by shooting, robot-like, until your arms fall off.

The second thing that spoiled skeet was the move to shooting “gun up”—that is, having the gun already mounted with the safety off before calling for the bird. To me this is an even bigger knock than the predictability, because it destroys any pretence of imitating a game-shooting situation. No one walks in on a point with gun at the shoulder and the safety off (at least I fervently hope they don’t).

But by using your grouse gun and shooting it gun-down, you can immediately turn skeet into serious game-shooting practice. Take up position at each station with the gun off your shoulder the way it would be walking up on a point, with the safety on, and snick it off as you shoulder the gun.

If you do this shooting in a formal group of competitive skeet shooters, you’ll face considerable pressure to get with the program, shoot gun-up and safety-off and fixate on your score like everyone else. This is why I suggest you frequent skeet fields during slack periods, if possible accompanied only by one or two like-minded game shooters.

The second problem you need to cope with is the predictability—and really, nothing could be easier. There are eight stations in skeet. There is no law that says you have to shoot them all. As long as you shoot only 25 birds per round, or pay extra, the club doesn’t care the order you shoot, and as long as you observe safety rules you can do pretty much what you like. I would check with the club management first, of course, but nothing I am about to suggest is in any way dangerous.

One approach is to shoot at “half-station” positions. Shoot your first four birds from a position halfway between stations one and two and your next four between stations two and three. You can do this all the way around, and you would be amazed at the subtle differences in flight patterns. It forces you to stop shooting mechanically and start shooting at each individual clay, sizing up its line of flight and reacting accordingly.

This is probably the easiest way to solve the predictability problem.

Another method is to stop shooting singles and shoot all doubles. This approach has been formalized in various ways, and some clubs even have doubles tournaments. Simply put, you shoot no single birds at all. The shooter gets one pair of doubles at station one, two pairs at each of the remaining stations except seven, where you get just one pair, and you skip station eight altogether. Station eight is widely considered too easy once you get the hang of it, and with a gun already mounted, it is. Try it gun-down, safety on, though, and you’ll find it actually isn’t bad practice for woodcock in thick cover. You’ll miss more than you hit, at least at first, and what could be more realistic than that?

Another approach that shakes you out of the set-piece mentality of skeet is to shoot the course completely in reverse. Everything is the same, except you start at station eight and work your way back to station one. The extreme form is to shoot the double first at each station, then low house, then high house. It may be a revelation to see how deeply you’re mired in the skeet rut when you do the same things but completely out of order. Mechanical reactions go out the window, and you’re forced to deal with each situation individually instead of putting your shooting on autopilot.

When shooting doubles, you can also shoot the birds in reverse order. At station one, you would break the in-comer first then the high-house bird. At every station this approach forces you to get on the first bird quickly, otherwise the second bird will be but a disappearing memory.

Then there’s the delayed pull. You can have your partner push the button anywhere from one to five seconds after you call. Or you can have him give you doubles as report pairs, or random pulls where you don’t know which bird is coming or when. As soon as you’re in position, he pushes whichever button he likes, whenever he feels like it.

As you can see, the possibilities are almost endless if you apply your imagination. The trick is to forget about your score and concentrate on learning to deal with unexpected or unfamiliar shots—within reason, of course. You want to create situations that demand lightning assessments, quick reactions and good gun handling, not to try to force the other fellow to miss. Just remember, he’ll shortly be pulling the birds for you, and what goes around comes around.

Skeet has always been shot with four gauges: 12, 20, 28 and .410. It’s now almost universal practice to shoot one gun and vary the gauge using tube inserts. This gives the advantage of a gun that feels familiar and has the same balance every time, but it does nothing for game shooting with smaller-gauge guns. If you like to shoot quail with a 28, then shoot skeet with your 28-gauge quail gun.

For safety reasons, all clubs have restrictions on shot size (usually #71/2 is the largest allowed) and many prohibit any charge larger than 11/8 ounces, but this is no real obstacle for our purposes.

Some skeet clubs have gone mad with rules and prohibit any deviation from the prescribed course for competitive skeet. If that is the case, then you have a problem. Still, you can always use a game gun as long as it falls within their requirements (and almost all do), and you can shoot gun-down, safety on. That’s the way skeet was shot originally, and that step alone will make skeet vastly better practice for game shooting.