Practice hard, shoot easy...

Strong winds, driving rain and bad light.  The worst conditions for DTL shooting

Sir Donald Bradman retired from cricket in 1948, he did so with a batting average of 99.99. Many say he was the greatest batsmen ever.  When asked about his secrets and what made him the player he was, he would talk about how, as a child in Australia, he would spend hours on his own hitting a golf ball off a water tank with a stump.  If you imagine the thickness of a cricket stump, and the width of a golf ball, Bradman would hit the golf ball off the water tank and then hit it again on the rebound, over and over again.  When it then came to hitting a cricket ball with a cricket bat, it must have seemed like hitting a football with barn door.

In darts too, many of the great players spend hours practicing on boards with the wires much closer together.  The treble ring and double ring are just one third the size of a normal dartboard.  If they can hit the scores on these boards, it then makes it much easier to play on the normal board with much bigger targets.

This is something that I feel is important in DTL shooting too.

My club would have a reputation for targets that are difficult to shoot.  Perhaps it's the slope from left to right that plays tricks with people's minds or maybe the targets are a bit more edge on than most.  What I can say though with complete confidence, is that anyone who can hit scores on our targets will hit scores anywhere.

There are those who simply refuse to shoot our targets.  Many of them are very good shooters and more than capable of hitting big scores.  However, the days they shoot the big scores are usually days of good weather and calm conditions.  How many days will you shoot like that in a year though?

On a day where there might be a wind gusting, or poor light, or heavy rain and the odd target might do something out of the ordinary, these 'fair weather shooters' very rarely shoot scores.

Some people simply refuse to shoot if the weather isn't right.  I once saw one of Northern Ireland's top DTL shooters turn up at a registered ground one day.  He parked his car, opened the door, got one leg out of the car, took a look round and saw the trees moving in the gusty wind, he then said "...nobody will shoot a score that day...", got back into his car and drove off again.  I realise these shooters are shooting for scores to represent their countries but what happens if they turn up on the day of the home internationals and it's a wet and windy day?

Just yesterday I went to my club practice shoot on what was an absolutely horrendous day for shooting.  It was "Storm Dierdre" apparantly.  Torrential rain and winds so strong you felt the roof would lift off the clubhouse at times.

I was half toying with the idea of not shooting at all.  There were very few people there and being on the side of a hill, 250 metres above sea level, we are exposed to the elements at the best of times.  Yesterday, there was very little to stop the full force of the winds and rain.  The light was awful too.

A couple of other members arrived and we decided, 4 of us just, to give it a try around 3pm.  It was like a mix of DTL, ABT, Olympic Trap... The targets were doing almost everything you could imagine.  There were birds going to the right and getting picked up by the storm force winds and rocketing skyward.  There were left hand birds barely getting above the trap house.  The targets leaving straight out, or slightly to the right, were curving from they left the trap and landing out side the left side distance marker.  All this while the light was fading very quickly. Absolutely horrible targets on a horrible day weather wise.

The targets may have been shockingly bad but I have never enjoyed a days shooting like it in a long time.  You really needed to attack the targets.  Which suits me just fine.  I didn't change anything in the way I approached each stand and each individual target.  There was a window, which luckily enough was at my usual pick up point for the target, where the target left the trap and reached a certain height before the wind had it's way with the target.  There was no point in me trying to take the target any quicker as I could not see a full target.  There was no point in letting the target get out as it could have went anywhere.  It was simply a matter of calling the bird, seeing the bird and shooting the bird.  The same as shooting on a glorious summers day without a breath of wind.

I missed two targets out of 50 on the day.  One was a left hander that didn't get above the trap house, which you have to accept that you're probably going to miss on a stormy day.  The other, I 'flashed' at.  Remember what I said about calling pull, seeing the bird and then shooting the bird?  The bird I missed, I called pull, saw a flash and pulled the trigger.  I missed the middle part of the 3 steps completely.  It is impossible for me to shoot a target when I have not taken the time to see it.  I suspect more targets are missed like this than enough.  It wasn't down to the weather that I missed that target, it was down to ill discipline.  Again, I would not have hit that bird on a calm day by trying to shoot it before I could see it.

I learned more about my shooting yesterday than I have in all the weeks of shooting 'good' targets.  I know my gun is fitting me perfectly as I felt as if I only had to look at the targets and they would break. So, the gun is pointing where I am looking.  I learned that, overall, I have a sound technique.  Pull, see the bird, shoot the bird seems to be working well for me.  If I can do that for each individual target in any shoot I know there's a good chance that I can still hit a score.  Regardless of the weather or the quality of the targets.  Shooting in the middle of a storm, for one day, has given me more confidence in my technique than hitting two or three straights on a calm day.

Now, it is alright shooting practice or flapper shoots in these conditions but I don't think that even I, the glutten for punishment that I am, would face a 100 bird shoot in such poor conditions.  That would just be a step too far for me personally.  Even if you did manage to shoot a score and even win the shoot on the day, chances are it would be with a pretty low score which would probably not be good enough to count for a qualifying score for the International team.

I know everyone likes to shoot the big scores but sometimes, shooting a decent score in bad conditions can do more for your confidence than shooting a perfect score in perfect conditions.

I came of those lines yesterday absolutely buzzing with a big silly grin on my face.  It is a long time since I got such a buzz from shooting DTL.

There are many shooters who would have the arm off you if you offered them a score of 48/142 before a shoot started on a good day. 

So, don't let the idea of poor weather and poor targets put you off.  If you can shoot them when they are bad, there's no reason you can't shoot them when they are good.

Peter O'Reilly - RIP

It was with great sadness last week that I learned of the passing of angling instructor, fly tier and author, Peter O' Reilly.

I personally had never met the man, but his book, "Trout & Salmon flies of Ireland", has had such an impact on my life as an angler and fly tier, that the news of his passing touched me deeply.

I remember buying his book in 1998 in a small private bookshop off Bishop's Street in L'Derry call The Bookworm. My cousin was in looking for books for her studies at university and I happened to see the book, which I had never seen before.  I remember picking it up to look at it and being truely amazed at the number of patterns and the materials lists to tie each individual fly in the book.  I had never seen so many flies.  I had a few books with trout and salmon patterns listed in them but with no picture to compare my attempts with, I really struggled.

There were many local patterns in "Along the Faughan Side" by Olly McGilloway and I also had E.J. Malone's book, "Irish Trout and Salmon Flies", which had a few 'plates' of flies shown in the middle pages but only a handful compared to the number of patterns listed in Peter's book.

This was before the days of social media, internet forums, or a lot of other online information that is available today with a quick search of google.  I had a few patterns stored away in old copies of "Trout and Salmon" magazine and other fly tying magazines but it was a real chore flicking through 50 copies of old magazines to find a particular fly I liked and wanted to try.

Even the magazines contained flies that were more Scottish in design rather than the Irish Shrimp patterns that were being used more locally.

Peter O'Reilly's book was something else.  Here were pages and pages of salmon flies, most of which I hadn't heard of before, many of which I now almost take for granted.

Up until that time I really only tried to tie, and failed miserably, flies like the Curry's Red and shrimps people had given me along the river. I was buying more flies than I was tying and buying them because I liked the colours more than anything.

Then I read Peter's fantastic book.  Not only lists of materials but pictures of 'plates' of flies to get some idea of how the fly should look, rather than trying to picture it in my head and not knowing if this thing I'd tied bore any resemblance to how the finished fly should look.  Also some information about each pattern.  How it came to be and who tied it if the information was known.  What time of the year they should be used and what type of water they worked best in or what light suited them best.  The book didn't just help me to know what a fly pattern should look like but also made me a far better angler.

When I look back through my old angling diaries, when I kept them, from the late 90's and early 2000's, most of the successful flies had come from O'Reilly's book.  It was really the first time I'd seen the Foxford Shrimp or the Bann Special.  I know most anglers and tiers of today will laugh at that, as they are such common and well known patterns today, but it is true. The number of fish that I have taken on those two flies alone over the years, in various sizes, I simply cannot imagine my angling life without them. 

Bann Special

My attention was drawn to the two patterns above as Peter had listed his 10 favourite shrimp flies in the book.  The Bann Special was number one and the Foxford, number two.  Can anyone really argue with that?  If I could only fish with two flies for the rest of my life, I'd have one on the point and the other on the dropper and would catch salmon all season long and not feel, in any way restricted.

Foxford Shrimp and Bann Special - The top two in the list of flies

The Red & Gold shrimp is quite simply my most successful end of season fly ever and another that I didn't know about until reading through O'Reilly's book. I remember reading through it one day in September around the year 2000 and seeing the Red and Gold shrimp and reading the remarks that it was "...a truly excellent Autumn fly. Those who use it claim that late running grilse and autumn fish cannot resist it." That was all the incentive I needed and tied one right away.  The next day, my neighbour and I went to fish in 'McGuinness's Stream' on the Faughan.  He had a fish on the flying C as I was setting up.  I came down the stream behind him.  The water was colouring and was almost sandy looking.  I thought I was wasting my time when I got near the tail of the pool and saw a fish turning at the fly.  I was about to call out that I'd missed one when the line went tight and I landed a sparkling silver autumn salmon.  It is impossible to count the number of fish I landed on that pattern over the following seasons.

Red & Gold Shrimp

The Foxford Shrimp, Bann Special and the Red & Gold Shrimp are just three of the many flies that have caught me fish that were tied from O'Reilly's wonderful book.

If the news of his passing saddened me, just from reading his book. Those who knew the man, his family and friends, those who had lessons or instruction from him, those who he fished with, etc. It must be a terrible loss to them all.

Thank you Peter.  May you Rest in Peace.