Back in 2020, I had as one of my goals to shoot a large tournament. The one I selected was the East Coast Championship held each spring at Hunter’s Pointe in Washington NC. I thoroughly enjoyed that experience, and have returned each year to participate in that tournament. If you haven’t experienced a large event such as this, I highly recommend it!
This year, I decided to participate in five side events (12 ga. sporting, 20 ga. sporting, super sporting, pump gun, and side x side) all of which are held on a separate course from the main event. The 50 target side events are really a lot of fun! No squad or pre-set time is required as is on the preliminary and main events. Trappers are posted at each station. You can simply wall up to a station, hand them your score card and shoot the menu for the event. I also decided to shoot FITASC this year. This was only my third time shooting FITASC. For several years, I had avoided trying it thinking the rules were complicated. In fact, I have found the referees and fellow competitors to be very kind and helpful – especially if you let them know you are a novice at FITASC. If you are like me, and are hesitant to try it, I encourage you to just sign up for a FITASC event and give it a go!
Every time I shoot, I try to come away with something that was useful to my development as well as recognition of things I did well or need to work on. This event provided several take-aways. I thought I might share these with you. Remember, at each event, you win big or win small, but you always win! If you missed that post, you can find it HERE. So, without further ado, here are my “lesson learned”:
Having practiced shooting in the rain previously was very useful! I had discussed that in a previous post you can find HERE. We had a cold drizzly rain for our final two FITASC parcours on Sunday afternoon. However, based on my previous practice in more severe conditions, I was not surprised by how It felt to shoot in the rain. I was also well prepared with appropriate clothing, rags to dry both my gun and my glasses, etc. The only hick-up I had was inadvertently knocking my safety to the “on” position while drying off my gun prior to my turn to shoot my singles (at least it was just singles and I only lost one bird!) on one peg. Lesson learned – check the safety at the start of each parcours and after drying off the gun! Another lesson learned… if you have a malfunction of any sort in FITASC, you are supposed to just stop and allow the referee to assess the cause. I mistakenly opened the gun without being directed to do so. Next time I will know better.
Weather can make clay shooting very interesting! The day before, we had some pretty significant breeze. I tried to capture how windy it was in the following picture in which the signs indicating the trap numbers were being leaned over.
I don’t think it captured very well how strong it really was! I actually enjoyed shooting in the wind. Every target ended up being unique requiring the shooter to really stay focused on what the target was doing – and not “what it should do”.
Another take away was experiencing just how valuable shooting a warm-up can be! I don’t always shoot a warm up at every competition, but seeing how I shot 3 different guns in the first day of competition, it was good to reacquaint myself with each gun before heading out to each event. I ended up shooting two warm-ups before FITASC – one from either end of the warm-up five-stand. That was actually good practice as it simulates to some degree, shooting the same targets from different pegs in FITASC. What I failed to do in my FITASC warm-up was to shoot the targets from a low-gun FITASC mount position! I only realized that after the fact – another “note to self” for next time!
List, list, lists – I love lists. You may recall my first post on lists – if not, you can find it HERE. In that post – I relayed a personal story in which I forgot to pack my shooting glasses. Well, this time, I remembered to bring them to the event, but I failed to put them on before shooting! I shot in my daily wear glasses (which happen to have progressive lenses – not ideal for focusing on the target since they allow you to keep the gun’s bead in perfect focus if you look thru the bottom of the lenses). I failed to notice this until after the final FITASC parcours was shot! To let you know how focused I was on my shooting, I had even taken my glasses off several times to clean them from the rain – and didn’t notice they were the wrong glasses. I guess that is a good thing. One more thing to add to the list! Pack the glasses and be sure to put them on…
A final lesson I learned was one of patience. On Saturday, I had decided to shoot my pump gun after completing my FITASC parcours for the day. The weather forecast was for rain on Sunday, so it would seem that other shooters had elected to shoot side events on Saturday rather than waiting for Sunday when it was going to be wet. As it turns out, it took me 3 hours to shoot a round of 50 targets. Had I known that upfront, I probably would have elected to pass on shooting the event, but once I got started, I decided to see it through. I do think my meditation practice using the MUSE system has helped me to be calm during situations like this. There was no point in getting antsy about it as this was something I had elected to do for fun! I don’t shoot the pump gun that often, and even though it took a while to complete the event, I did have a good time taking advantage of the down time between stations to strike up conversation with some old friends and to make some new ones!
So, as you can see, I had some small wins – and even one big one! The very first event I shot with my friend Dave Coffman was the side by side. These are guns we don’t shoot that often. I managed to end up at the top of my class – although I have to come clean and admit that there were only two shooters in my class – but a win is a win!
Once again, if you haven’t shot a big tournament, give it a try. You will certainly have a lot of opportunities to win big and win small and enjoy the process!