Breaking clays all summer is fun, and it pays off in the fall. American trap and skeet, along with sporting clays and five stand, are the most popular of these sports in the United States. All of them have their place as target practice for waterfowlers, but shooting clays doesn’t completely replicate wingshooting. Think of it as the driving range and putting green for shotgunners, where you hone the fundamental skills that you’ll rely on during hunting season. Here’s how to get the most out of your off-season practice.
Trap
Trap remains the most popular clay-target sport in the United States, and there is likely a trap field not far from your home. Consisting of a series of going-away targets, trap punishes head-lifting and riding targets and rewards shooting without hesitation and keeping your head on the stock. Because the trap oscillates to throw birds at unknown angles, you have to read the target, lock your eyes on it, and then move your hands to it, just as you do when hunting. Trap polishes your gun-pointing skills. Spend a summer shooting trap, and you’ll see improvement during the season, especially on birds over the decoys.
Skeet
Skeet gives you incoming, outgoing, and crossing targets. A round of skeet begins with an overhead outgoer resembling an early-morning wood duck sneaking in from behind you. While skeet targets are shot at fairly close ranges, the perceived leads on crossing targets at stations 3, 4, and 5 are quite long. Shooting skeet helps you get comfortable with those long leads.
Skeet doubles aren’t realistic—they fly in opposite directions—but they are great for learning to shoot the first bird, see it break, and then move quickly to the second. Shooting skeet with a pre-mounted gun is fine for learning how to lead targets, but as a hunter, you’ll get better practice if you start from a low-gun position. In fact, I think low-gun skeet is the best all-around wingshooting practice there is.
Sporting Clays/Five Stand
Sporting clays are often thrown in pairs, giving you practice in making the transition from the first bird to the second. It’s the most social and most fun of the clay-target games, and if you skip the cart and walk the course, it’s the best exercise too.
Some sporting clays targets fly like nothing you’ll ever see in the field. They go straight up, they fall, they curve, they bounce along the ground, and there are techniques to learn that don’t necessarily apply to hunting situations. But those targets are challenging, and when you can hit everything a sporting clays course throws at you, ducks and geese seem easy by comparison. You can also skip stations and only shoot the targets that resemble shots at waterfowl. You can stay at a station as long as you’d like. Just let others play through, and don’t exceed the number of targets you’re paying for.
Five stand combines sporting clays and skeet. Most courses offer targets thrown at angles similar to those that you will see in the field. Targets are thrown first as a single, followed by a pair. The single allows “full use of the gun,” meaning that if you miss, you can shoot a second time, giving you the opportunity to practice following up.
Guns and Ammo
Your duck gun, if it has choke tubes, will do the job on any clays course, and you’ll build familiarity with it from a summer of shooting. Some of us prefer dedicated target guns because we score better with them and benefit from the confidence those scores bring. Both approaches work. You can also split the difference, shooting a target gun for much of the off-season before switching to your duck gun as opening day nears.
As for ammo, forget about matching the velocity of your hunting and target loads. The recoil of high-velocity target loads can lead to flinching and other bad habits. Differences in speed mostly matter when you let them get into your head. I shoot 1,180-fps trap loads all summer; I mainly hunt with 1,450-fps steel waterfowl loads and hardly notice a difference.
