Pilford again this morning. I do look forward to Pilford.
It was colder than promised by the Met Office, I wasn't the only one to feel it, so I have my dear wife that the heating at home is now officially in use. I have already conducted a search for thicker socks, vests and the like and from now on I shall dress for winter.
A great little layout; I was caught out by a long looping flat clay that presented itself as a disc for everyone else but a thin edge-on line for me (at least it felt that way) and I dropped a couple of those. All my other misses were simply lack of focus. I knew where I wanted to put the shot, but simply failed to do it. Sloppy shooting. Apart from one shot where I actually seemed to flinch. The muzzle jerked away from the target, the shot was fired, and I was miles off.
I enjoyed the morning, and my next door neighbour who joined us gave a memorable display of hesitation followed by an excellent shot when a colourful pink clay emerged from the trap - he didn't know about the random "hit this one and win a bottle of wine" thing that they do there. He acted just like a pigeon shooter confronted by something that isn't quite like a pigeon and did the "do I shoot it or leave it alone" action for a second. This is the chap who last year shot the first of a simultaneous pair, auto failed to load for the second shot, and in one fluid motion cycled the bolt to load the next cartridge, returned the gun to his shoulder and fired at the rapidly descending second clay resulting in a cloud of clay dust. Great stuff!
I would say that the standard of target difficulty was well chosen, a few easy, some hard, one or two rather challenging.
Importantly, I rate the bacon baps there as first class. Everyone is friendly (staff and shooters alike), and I can't wait for next month.
Edited to add: I shall not allow my eventual score the oxygen of publicity.
