Hoping to have done a little skeet shooting this weekend

You may not know this about me, but I’m even better at shooting skeet than I am at golfing.

At the writing of this column, I’m making plans to participate in the annual Roosevelt General Hospital Foundation’s Skeet Shoot (it was held Saturday). I planned on bagging a whole brace of the critters, so if you have a good recipe for skeet I can probably use one today.

I started shooting a shotgun before my arms were long enough to shoulder one. Some people might say my arms still aren’t long enough and they might be right.

I never owned a single-barrel youth gun like lots of kids. My folks gave my brother and I each a Mossberg pump 12-gauge when I was 12 or 13. We gave those guns a workout on quail and dove during the fall and jackrabbits and beer bottles when the upland game season closed.

Pitching bottles into the air was the earliest form of skeet but fortunately I moved beyond that to clay pigeons that we flung with a hand-held thrower.

I saved my pennies and finally bought a Remington 1100 autoloader that I’ve had for decades. If I had $10 for every box of shells I’ve run through that thing I would probably have enough money to buy a pretty nice pickup. But I had a lot of fun blowing my wad that way.

When I lived in Tucumcari I joined a skeet shooting class/league operated through the adult enrichment programs at the old Tucumcari Area Vocational School. We actually had an in-ground trap house and concrete shooting aprons. When I joined I didn’t even know that stuff existed.

The instructor was actually a former national skeet title holder. Fortunately a small amount of his wisdom stuck with me.

Later on, when I lived in Colorado, a group of three or four of us went shooting every Sunday until it got too cold. We had a nice trap house at that range too, so we would each run three or four boxes of shells through the shotguns, then start shooting whatever other guns we had brought.

For me it didn’t take long to shoot all the guns I brought but a contractor buddy had half a dozen guns the rest of us had never seen before each week.

He called his gun collection “his retirement.” His plan after he retired was to just sell a gun whenever he needed money.

I’m betting it worked out pretty well for him but I do know he was careful not to disclose to his wife just how many firearms he owned.

I’d heard about this crazy RGH Shoot for a while but didn’t get around to doing it until 2018. The layout utilizes throwers coming off of haystacks and a shooting spot that includes the deck of an old motorboat floating in a pit.

Like golf, these days I manage to shoot clay targets about once a year. But if the old Model 1100 holds together through the morning maybe I’ll have outshot a few guys with fancy Belgium made shotguns.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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