Have you ever wondered what all the fuss is about shooting?  I decided to find out by doing a 20 minute shotgun coaching course with the BASC (British Association for Shooting and Conservation).This was available for £15 at the Annual Game Fair, which is organised by the CLA - oops another acronym - that stands for The Country Landowners and Business Association.   Their annual three day event took place this year in deepest Warwickshire at Ragley Hall,  in late July.

My shooting coach was Stewart Lees from Cornwall, an experienced trainer whose first experience of firing a gun was over 30 years ago with shoulder-jolting .303's at school in his CCF (Combined Cadet Force or school soldiery with real weapons).  Stewart is tall and has sharp eyes which are immediately weighing you up to see which way your body leans and which of your eyes is the dominant one.  He's one of those people you like as soon as you meet him, even when he's been giving shotgun lessons for the previous 8 hours in the hot sun.  He handed me a shooting jacket, ear defenders and safety glasses.

How you hold the gun and good shooting posture
"Are you right- or left-handed and which is your dominant eye?" he enquired.  We soon established that I was right-handed and my left eye was dominant which is far from ideal so to stop me trying to use my left eye Stewart stuck some black  tape onto the left lens of my safety glasses which then meant that I had no option but to use my right eye with my right shoulder, a simple and effective solution. He then introduced me to "my gun" which was surprisingly light and I could see all the BASC trainers were treating the guns with great care making sure that the guns were seen to be unloaded by either being “broken”, or in the case of my semi-automatic having a safety blocker fitted, except where the shotguns were actually being used.  I needed to be shown how to hold the gun properly - into the shoulder and significantly higher up in the shoulder than I'd expected.  My stance was to be with my left foot placed forward, my left knee bent and my upper body leaning forward without tilting my head sideways too much and keeping my right cheek touching the stock.  He made me feel like a professional, although I knew that as soon as he stopped arranging my limbs I'd be all over the place!

Into action - firing live shots at clay pigeons
"Right", explained my coach, "we've talked about safety, I've shown you the gun mount, the gun fit and now I'll show you how to hit a clay pigeon.   We'll do a dozen or so and I can't see why you shouldn't hit all of them" his confidence was inspiring and I felt that I didn’t want to let him down!.  We went forward to the shooting position and Stewart pointed out where the clays would be fired from and then pressed a magic button showing how he would fire the moving targets.  These "clay pigeons" are in fact circular disks made from compressed clay particles and they are very brittle so that when they are hit they shatter dramatically.  They are fired from an automatic "trap" (a sort of catapult-like machine) and spin as they shoot upwards so that they move at a pace which you can follow but they are definitely moving quite fast.  As I was a complete beginner, the clays were only going to be sent up vertically and always in the same direction and I would even be told when they were being fired.  Even I could see that this would make it much easier to hit one of these discs than to hit a real bird.

The technique that I was to use meant following the clay upwards with the gun, catching up with it, overtaking it so that the muzzle of the gun hides it and then firing just in front of where the clay pigeon was going.  I really couldn't see how a single shot could hit this small, moving target until my coach explained that the "cartridge" had over 500 pieces of lead shot and that these would spread out into a progressively larger circular pattern, until about 40 metres when the pattern would become so large that holes would appear in the pattern and the “clays” would be able to pass through the pattern without being hit, this, he pointed out is in fact the maximum effective range of a shotgun. I begun to think I just might hit one  - with luck!

Breaking the clay pigeons with the shotgun
"Bang!" - I'd fired at about the right time and surprised us both by hitting my first clay, with considerable help.  Behind the glasses I must have smiled the biggest grin of the day and eagerly reloaded for the next shot.  Other shots included some hits and a few misses but I started to see the difference between a direct hit smashing the clay into smithereens and just catching the edge of the disc and I certainly felt the thrill of actually hitting the target full on.  When I'd finished Stewart handed me one of the empty cartridges as a souvenir and told me to have an occasional sniff of the acrid burnt gunpowder which he promised would make me want to come back for more.

Outside BASC training, Stewart Lees also shoots rifles helping to manage the deer population on the Duchy of Cornwall's woodlands where he's part of a syndicate of 18 marksmen.  Stewart also runs a venture offering clay pigeon shooting in the Tamar Valley in Cornwall and he's always willing to offer private coaching - ring him at 01579 384714 or e-mail him at [email protected] .  You can also look him up through his ski guiding website at http://www.sunandskizellamsee.com/contactus.php .

Although I still have reservations about shooting animals for sport, I now see the immense satisfaction of shooting even as an outright beginner and I'll be going back for more shotgun training.