QUAIL CREEK PLANTATION--
A country club for the shooting set

Life gives us a bonus once in awhile and my most recent one came in the form of a Sporting Clay's shotgun shooting outing at this 5-star facility near Lake Okeechobee in Southern Florida.

Sue has a dandy new friend, Naomi of Cincinnati, OH and for the past several years the two gals have enjoyed a boatload of camaraderie--or whatever ladies call it--at a local arcade in Vero Beach.  Turns out Naomi's hubby Gordon is an accomplished Sporting Clay's shotgunner.

This melded nicely with my strong support of the US Constitution's right to keep and bear arms and led to an invite from Gordon to join he and shooting pal Steve from Michigan's Upper Peninsula for a morning's noisy romp across the plantation's 14 station practice event.

After uncasing a dandy pair of 12 gauge shotguns, a Benelli autoloader and a Winchester over and under, dumping a box or so of cartridges in handy belt cases (with plenty more ammo where that came from) we boarded Gordon's nifty golf-cart-turned-shooting-chariot and headed for the range.

The shooters alternated between shooting first then operating the hand controller for the clay pigeon launchers while the other took his turn shooting.  At each shooting station shooters could observe a practice launch of the clay pigeons (flying targets).

The targets are about 4.25 inch diameter, flat discs resembling a small Frisbee which are slung by a machine.  They can pass the shooting station from any direction at various velocities including from behind or from far ahead and flying straight toward the shooter.

They can start high and dive past the shooting station, or low and sail by in a climbing arc going somewhere.  Some are slung by the machine to roll rapidly across the ground in front of the shooter, resembling a rabbit in a hurry.

The discs are made of fairly fragile carbon based and brightly painted (sometimes) material that shatters when hit by a quantity of shotgun pellets.  They are said to "powder" when struck squarely by most of the cartridge's load.

Some discs are painted green to challenge the shooter's ability to pick their flight out of the green foliage background.

Sporting clay shooting is often described as "Golf with a shotgun".

Mostly each shooter would load two cartridges in his shotgun and shoot five sets of two.  A perfect score in this case would be hitting 10 discs out of 10.  After both have shot, we moved on to the next station which would offer entirely different trajectories to challenge the participants.

10 shots per man over a course of 14 stations equals 140 shots each.  25 cartridges to the box would equal 5.6 boxes of ammunition shot by each fellow that day.

I can remember entire rabbit hunting seasons where I didn't consume one box of shells while hunting with my trusty single barrel gun.

The guys offered me several opportunities to shoot and I declined saying I usually never shot anything that hurt me which the recoil of 12 gauge shotguns tend to do.

Actually my reticence was mostly from a strong instinct to avoid embarrassment.