Nobody’s satisfied, but everybody’s happy.
At least Dan, Bret and I aren’t satisfied. Ward’s mature enough to know he’ll never be satisfied, so he shoots this beautiful AYA side by side and calls it good. Sometimes he hits six in a row, and sometimes he misses six in a row. But he’s smart enough not to keep searching for a better gun. Dan, Bret and I could learn something from him. But then I wouldn’t have anything to write about, and that’s no fun.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Every September, my friends invite me to shoot skeet with them at the Charlevoix Rod and Gun Club. They’re all really good shooters, sneaking in some last-minute practice before bird season begins. I’m more like Happy Gilmore, tagging along and surprising myself every time a clay breaks when I pull the trigger.
According to Bret, I shouldn’t be surprised. I was the one who taught him to shoot skeet. I started in high school, somewhere around 1987, at the Elk Rapids Sportsman’s Club. Back then I shot a 20-gauge Winchester 101 that I bought used from Hampel’s for the whopping sum of $600. My inept negotiation went something like this:
“How much for the Winchester 101?”
“$600.”
“That’s a lot of money, don’t you think?”
That’s when my dad stepped in and said something like, “I think what he means is would you take any less?”
“Ah … no.”
We took a drive around the block as Dad asked me if I really wanted to spend all of my summer earnings from the cherry packing plant on that shotgun. The answer was yes, so we went back in and the salesman at least dropped the price of the taxes for me.
Choked skeet and skeet, with 26-inch barrels, it was the perfect gun for me. Serious target shooters all use longer barrels today, especially for sporting clays, but I still have an affinity for short-barreled doubles. I took it weekly to the club where I would nervously join a group of strangers who all knew what they were doing, mostly older men in their 60s-80s wearing plaid shirts and khakis. One in particular shot an old Browning Citori with a lit cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. Instead of crisply barking, “Pull!” he would drawl, “Let it out …” I think his name was Luigi. He almost never missed.
According to Bret, Luigi and the others taught me all the leads for all the different stations, and I taught them to Bret. (In skeet you walk around a semi-circle and shoot a target from the high house on the left and then a target from the low house on the right. Then, at all but the three middle stations, you shoot a pair of doubles — a target coming from each house at the same time and crossing in the middle of the field.) My best score might have been a 21 or so, whereas Bret shot a perfect score of 25 on his second try.
The disturbing thing for people like me who are worried about dementia is after not shooting skeet for 30 years, I can’t remember any of the leads. Nor can I remember teaching them to Bret.
After loving the Winchester 101 for a number of years, I sold it when I went to work for Steve Smith at Traverse City’s Game and Gun, a beautiful wing shooting magazine, where side–by–sides were the classy, original bird gun to carry. I bought a side-by-side Merkel from Germany that I never shot well, which I traded in for an SKB 585 over/under with a silver receiver that I didn’t like the look of which I traded in for a black Beretta Onyx at Cliff’s Rifle Shop and which I will never trade in even though it has a stock that is much too short for me.
In search of the perfect gun, Dan showed up at Charlevoix with a used 20-gauge Beretta Onyx that he recently purchased at Jays. It has long barrels and the right length of pull (the distance from the trigger to the end of the stock) and swings beautifully. Dan couldn’t miss with it, and we were all jealous, especially Bret who has been looking for one of these rare Berettas for quite some time, until something weird started happening with the ejectors and the gun wouldn’t close when shells were in it. Dan’s currently looking for a good gunsmith unless YouTube performs its magic and he figures out how to remove the ejectors himself.
Bret showed up with a 12-gauge Beretta 686 over/under target gun with the most beautiful stock I’ve ever seen. He shot a score of 22 with it and then replaced it with a TriStar (THE VALUE EXPERTS!) .410 side-by-side with which he shot a round of 24 and another round of 23. Which makes no sense. Bret is now searching for an over/under .410 or maybe a Weatherby Orion side-by-side .410 or some custom made .410 that will cost him $5,000 and will shoot no differently than the cheap TriStar. Someone could get a really good deal on his Beretta right now, and we’ll probably be driving 8 hours to Pittsburg this winter to go to Joel Etchen’s Gun Room where you can spend all sorts of money on beautiful high-end double guns.
And I will be selling my brand new Weatherby Orion 12 gauge over/under that punished my shoulder for 75 shots. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s brand new, beautiful and shoots well. But it has no soul, and I’ll try to replace it with a nostalgic Winchester 101 that was made back in the 70s and which will take me back to my days at the Cherry Ke Packing Plant and the smell of bleach and tart cherries every time I shoot it.
None of this makes sense, of course, in the same way that it makes no sense how one can hit six in a row and then miss six in a row from a skeet field where you have the gun to your shoulder and you know where the target is coming from and where it’s going to as well as how fast it’s traveling. But it’s all a lot of fun, the shooting and shopping and heckling with a group of friends where you’re the only ones on the skeet field while everyone else is off shooting sporting clays and it’s September and the wind is blowing cold and fall is just around the corner.