Fun With Sporting Clays

I was invited by a friend yesterday to do some sporting clay shooting.

Sporting clays was explained to me as being:  "Like golf, but with shotguns". 

This was intriguing, and having never done it before, I said yes I'd gove it a shot. 

So I met up with him at the Detroit Gun Club where he's a member and we got checked in.

I got a loaner gun, an Italian over/under 12 gauge, which turned out to be an over $14k shotgun.  Very nice indeed. It did, however, have one quirk that made for an interesting time.

So we headed out to the sporting clay course.

Having not shot sporting clays before it was rather interesting.

You go form station to station and typically shoot 2 sets of two clays. The clays zip along at different angles and are rather a lot of fun to try and hit.

The quirk of the loaner shotgun was that right above the mechanism to open the action, there was a switch on top inline with the safety, that unbeknownst to me, when I opened the action, my hand also brushed and moved that small switch from one red dot to two. 

It then quite surprisingly fired both barrels at once for a rather spicy shot at the first clay.  Ouch. 

I was surprised, my friend was surprised, the very annihilated clay was also surprised. 

We figured out what was doing it, and I had to be very careful to check each time I closed the action as that switch moved with very little prompting.

So we shot at all 16 stations, and I steadily improved as we went. 

Took quite a bit to figure out how much to lead the clay targets, not to mention where they were coming from at times. and I missed a lot starting out trying to figure things out.

I did manage to have a clean run at one station with all four targets hit, but I was typically 50/50. 

Still it was a lot of fun, and I'd go do it again.