Little Big Shoot.

Yes, it's another blog about shooting. Can't help myself. I have a really great time doing it. And it's my blog and I'm going to write about it. Sorry Jade and Carla.

I was going to arrange another big shoot like the one we did in Tampa. I made fliers, and a sign up sheet and went around seeing who would like to shoot. There was again, a really good response. But as the days wore on, people started dropping out left and right. Denver is a good hub for beautiful outdoor activities, so I can't complain that people wanted to go hiking or skiing. So I stopped organizing it.

Then, three days ago, people again became interested and were asking if we were going shooting or not. I didn't feeling like trying to organize it, so I just told people, if you really want to come, be in the lobby at 10 AM on Tuesday and we'd sort it out.

Besides the regular 4 shooters, we had 4 others. One of them was my friend Samantha, who lives in Denver. The other three shooters were the three that didn't change plans, Willy our rigger, Rick our bus driver, and Jason, our redneck (don't get your panties in a bunch, Jason will gladly admit to being a redneck). We piled into three cars and headed out to Colorado Clays.

Once again, a nice facility and nice people. Doug, my contact at Colorado Clays opened the club up for us, because Tuesdays is the only day they aren't open. Which means we had the whole place to ourselves. He's got all the shotgunning games, including one they invented called Colorado Trap, but I'll get back to that in a bit. We decided to make a day of it and were going to shoot all the games they had, so we figured we'd need at least 200 shells a piece.

In an effort to save money, we went to Bass Pro Shops on Monday night and purchased enough shells for everyone. We're not really sure if we saved money or not. Bass Pro was having a big sale on their shotgun shells and were completely sold out of the big boxes of shells, so we had to settle for buying a bunch of little boxes. We had a heck of a time trying to figure out how many boxes we needed to buy that would fit the criteria we were given by Doug (shot size and amount of gun powder per shell). We pieced together 1400 shells but with the headache and time we wasted, it would have been easier to just buy the shells on site.

Colorado Clays is a very nice facility. It's about 30 or so miles from downtown Denver, right near Denver International Airport. We arrived at the club house, signed in and then loaded our shells and guns onto golf carts and headed out to the wobble trap to warm up. We figured, we'll try wobble trap (which I've shot before), and at the same time warm up for the Sporting Clays course. We shot one round of wobble. I won't go into the details of wobble trap, but let's just say it's something that offers little different challenge from Sporting Clays. Some people liked it (me), but most were on the fence.

I'll let the pictures and video tell you the story of the Sporting Clays course.

This is my friend Samantha (rapper name "Sammy D"). Before this day, she had never shot a gun, much less a shotgun before. She's about 5 foot nothing and weighs less than 1oo pounds soaking wet. Needless to say, we gave her a smaller gun and a smaller shell to shoot. You can also tell from the picture, we were on the highland plains with lots of short grass and some scrub brush. No smoking on the course.

Here's another attempt at arty farty picture. I remember my dad teaching me about photography and how sometimes using things in the foreground to "frame" photo can make for a good picture. Tried to frame Maddi (rapper name "Madwell") with the tree on the left. How'd I do?


Here's another station being shot by Samantha. This one was unique in that the shooting stand butted up against two trees, so your firing lane (where you could see and hit the targets) was extremely narrow. One target from the left, the other from the right.


Here is Willy (rapper name Will.I.E.), shooting one of the fun stations. They had built a berm of dirt and then built a platform about 15 feet from the ground where you shot down on targets that were released from below you.

And finally, here's a video of Samantha shooting the 15 foot platform that Willy is on in the previous picture. Nothing fancy other than to note the really short barrel on the shotgun and the shells that fly out of the gun are yellow.

Why is yellow important? Because all 20 gauge shells (which she was shooting, I shoot 12 gauge, which is bigger) are yellow. Where as, 12 gauge shells can be any colour the manufacturer wants to make them. Why does this matter? Because you can slip a 20 gauge shell into a 12 gauge shotgun and it will slip down the barrel out of sight and get stuck. And if you didn't know you did it, and loaded another 12 gauge shell behind it and fired, a very large and bad disaster can happen. So remember, yellow shells do not go in a 12 gauge gun.

After the Sporting Clays course, Willy and Rick (rapper name "Lug nut"), headed back to the hotel, while the rest of us returned to the wobble trap field where Doug let us shoot his trademarked game, Colorado Clays. Again, I won't bore you with details, but it's a cross between 5-stand, wobble trap, and skeet. Here's a picture of Maddi, Jason (rapper name "Redneck") and Mel (rapper name "Mel") shooting the Colorado Trap.Although you can't see it in the picture, just beyond the tree line on the left is a golf course, and while you are shooting at this field, you are basically shooting at the golfers. A little unnerving, but rest assured, the shotgun pellets can't reach them. You can also note that the concrete walkways are how skeet and trap fields are designed.

After shooting a round of Colorado Trap (some people were impressed, but most were on the fence), Doug led us up to the Trap fields and let us shoot the rest of our shells there. I think trap is by far the easiest of the shotgunning games, because it's only one target launched away from you from the same place, every time. Granted there is a little bit of left to right in the launch, but the height and distance never change.

And finally, I was stung by a bee, ouch.You can see the dot where the stinger went in my forearm, and a little bit of redness and swelling around it. Now I know I'm not allergic to bee stings, but today the same spot is a little tender and the dot looks like a whitehead zit.

I wonder if I should try and pop it...

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