Tools for clay target shooting

This week I’m going to talk about the tools used for clay target shooting. There are three must have things. You need a good pair of safety glasses, hearing protection and a shotgun. One misconception is you need a high dollar shotgun to shoot clay targets. Not true, someone with a $10,000 shotgun and miss or hit the same amount of targets as someone with a $300 gun. I was lucky to find a great deal from a gentleman that was upgrading to a higher end firearm. Below is a photo of my shotgun, it’s a Beretta 686 over/under. The neat thing about my shotgun is that it came with an extra trap barrel and a full set of tubes.

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 Tubes are basically metal tubes you place into the barrels that let you shoot different gauges all in the same gun. For my gun I can shoot 12ga, 20ga, 28ga, and 410. In a skeet competition you are required to shoot all four gauges and by having tubes you don’t need to have four different shotguns.

  

The trap barrel is a little longer than the sporting barrel to help with the long distance shots you encounter with trap.

5 Stand

This week I’m going to be introducing you to one my favorite games, 5 stand.  In 5 stand you surrounded by eight trap machine throwing targets in many different directions. You shoot in turn five times at each of the five stands. Each stand has different combinations of targets. (See map below) At first 5 stand was an intimidating game to me. After a little homework and knowing how the maps read, it became my favorite.

Games and Maps:

Before you start a round you must first choose what game number you want to play. The games go from 1 to 6 with the higher the number the harder the game. Let's say, if I play Game #3. My first shot is going to come from trap 7 (see map below). The second time I shoot I must shoot a double from traps 6 & 5 and the third time I shoot 8 & 3. After I've shoot five times I move to another stand and given another combination for traps to shoot.

Here is a picture of the 5 Stand.