First off a Happy New Year to you all and welcome back. Well what a cracking day to have our first shoot of the year on, ok it was a bit chilly to start with but once the sun had done its job and warmed the air around us it was quite pleasant, you almost felt like peeling one of those layers of extra clothing off. It was a joy to be out in the fresh air and chatting to fellow shooters and of course blasting clays out of the sky. Darren had put on a fair old mixture of targets this morning ranging from you can’t possibly miss that to I think I’m going to need a bigger gun. Take stand 1, which was a straight incomer followed by a high left to right looper, the first few shooters I watched did not have a problem hitting either target but when I returned a bit later the looper was causing no end of problems even for guys who I know on the day are really good shots, obviously it wasn’t their day. You can walk from a stand after hitting all the clays and thinking to yourself that was easy, the next shooter goes in and misses everything and you can imagine what his/her thoughts were, go to another stand and the reverse happens, that’s why we call it clay shooting and not clay hitting, ha ha. Having said that stand 3 which was a pair of left to right battues being thrown out like Siamese twins (most of the time) so one shot should have seen them both off, but no, it still took two shots to wipe the little buggers out in most cases. Moving along to stand 6, this was the high bird over the trees and a right to left rabbit, as usual the high bird caused a few problems but the bunny proved to be an easy target for most shooters. Stand 7 which was the last one, was another stand that had people in two camps, a pair of right to left looping crossers, it seemed as long as you worked out which one to shoot first before they hit the deck you were on to a winner if not this one made a big hole in your score card. So for some it was a piece of cake other’s thought it was a tricky one, which camp were you in? The lowest score I saw was 35 and the highest was 62, whatever your score was, as long as you enjoyed yourselves and had fun chatting with your fellow shooters about why you hit or missed a certain target then that’s the joy of shooting plus there’s always the next time. This is something our regular members will know about, did you realise that there is a club house that will supply you with tea, coffee and bacon sandwiches all served to you by our lovely Hillary. The reason I’m mentioning, this is because I see many folk walk past it without give it a second look, now you know.