by Don Swearingen

Created on: November 11, 2009   Last Updated: November 13, 2009

Basics of Skeet Shooting

This time, it was going to be different. I knew the angle. I knew the speed. I even knew the color the clay bird was going to be. My cheek nestled against the stock, and I glared down the top of the barrel of my shotgun.

"Pull!" I barked.

The bird sped away from the high house. My body swung with the shotgun, and my finger yanked the trigger. A little piece of the bird came off and the rest of it, spun drunkenly away. My spirits soared, and I lowered the shotgun and looked around. My companions kept a polite silence for a few seconds.

"You gonna quit while you're ahead, or you wanna call for the low house?" a voice drawled, bringing me back to reality.

Trivia

Skeet - the word is said to be derived from the Scandinavian word for "shoot" - is a trap shooting game invented in the 1920s by Charles Davies. Originally, the game was built around a circle of shooting stations, and was called "clock" shooting, with a trap house in the center of the circle. When a farmer built a chicken farm next door, safety considerations changed the game. The full circle was cut in half (And faced away from the chicken farm), and another trap house was added, and a national contest was held, and Gertrude Hurlbutt came up with the name, "Skeet."

Today's sport of Skeet is highly organized, and millions participate. The National Skeet Shooting Association http://www.mynssa.com/CMS/NSSADisplayPage.aspx?PageT itle=NSSA Home , Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas is the governing body for the sport in the United States.

Description

Imagine a field with a half-circle marked out, two trap houses (A trap house is a small building that protects the trap machine. The "trap" throws clay discs called clay pigeons because trap shooting used to release live pigeons from a box called a trap), one short and one tall at the ends of the flat side of the half circle.

There are 7 stations around the half circle with station 1 being right next to the taller trap house (called the high house) and station 7 being right next to the shorter house (called, amazingly, the low house!). There is another station directly between the two houses, and that's station 8.

At stations 1, 2, 6 and 7 the shooter gets a bird from the high house, and then from the low house. Then he or she gets two at the same time. One from the high and one from the low. Doubles.

At all other stations, you get just one from each.

If you will do the math, that comes to 24 shots. Well, every box of shotshells in

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