Golf with a Shotgun

Mistakes look hard, or at least as if you're trying too hard. I know whereof I speak. After the shoot, I walked the same course and missed, missed, missed.

It's not as if I haven't shot before. I get out to hunt grouse and ducks each year. Usually I get most of my kills on my early shots. As the day progresses, instinct gives way to over-thinking, and I strike out. Sporting clays is all about instinct - learning to trust your gut instead of your brain. In fact, shotgunning is 90% instinct and 90% practice. True, that adds up to more than 100%. But the point is, you need lots of both.

Next Round: On the Coach

I needed some instinct lessons. I paired up with Geoff Kerr, chief shooting instructor for Orvis Co. and one of just 26 instructors in the United States who have achieved the National Sporting Clays Association's satori-like Level III ranking. Here's how he took me from being unbelievably bad to believably bad in three lessons.

Lesson One: Forget about the gun.

A good shot starts with a workable stance. Put yourself in a position that gives you the best opportunity to make a smooth, fluid shot.

"If you were walking along the shore," Kerr says to me as we approach the first station, "and I asked you to take your left hand and point at a seagull in flight, how would you do it?" I lift my arm and show him.

"There you go - you're pointing at a moving target," he says. "You aren't jabbing at it. You're following it in flight. And you aren't looking at the end of your finger as you try to follow the bird. You're pointing at it instinctively. That's almost all you need to do to hit a clay. The gun is nothing more than an extension of your pointing finger. Your other hand is there just to support the gun and to pull the trigger."

Lesson Two: Know your master eye.

Proper technique calls for keeping both eyes open as you look down the barrel of the gun. "When you pointed at that imaginary seagull, you didn't close one eye," says Kerr. "Neither should you when you are following a clay pigeon."

Trouble is, many of us have a dominant eye that is not the eye looking down the gun barrel. This off-line point of view creates a parallax situation that inhibits accuracy. One easy way to discover which is your master eye is to point at something. Then, while you are still pointing, close one eye. If your finger is still pointing straight at the object, you are looking at it through your master eye. If the object jumps off-line, you are looking at it through your weaker eye.

I'm a right-hander with a dominant left eye. Not good. To correct this, your instructor will probably put a little (removable) plastic dot - called a "magic dot" - in a critical spot on the lens of your shooting glasses.

Lesson Three: Have the courage to miss in front.

"Most beginners miss because they shoot behind the target," says Kerr. "There is no such thing as a sitting duck. The target always moves. You have to move with it."

The pattern of a shotgun blast is your ally. When a shot reaches a moving target that's 20 to 40 yards away from you, the pellets are traveling in a string roughly six feet long and two feet in diameter. That amounts to about 400 pellets, each one capable of scoring a hit.

Like an artist making a brush stroke, the goal is to "paint" the target as you pull the trigger. That way, your string of shot has a better chance of intercepting the target. Even if you shoot a little late, the front pellets might still hit the mark. Or if you pull the trigger early, the last pellets in the string might break the target. If you shoot behind the target, however, those first pellets will miss, and the rest of your gang of 400 will miss even more.

"I know you've spent your life believing that to hit the target, you must aim at the target," says Kerr. "Sporting clays is much more multi-dimensional - you shoot where the target is going. That's how they aim a rocket at the moon. That's how you hit a clay."

A frequent contributor to Fast Company, Peter Kaminsky (pkaminsky@aol.com) is coauthor of John Madden's Ultimate Tailgating (Viking, 1998). Researcher Scott Bowen assisted with this article.