No Cure for Stupid

It’s the middle of summer, and I’m bored. Well, not bored with life, just shooting-bored. Bird season doesn’t start for an eternity, and I’ve been shooting enough sporting clays to remind myself yet again just how bad I am. I need a new goal, a new mountain to conquer, a new crowd of adoring fans to awe. Translation: I need yet another game at which to humiliate myself.

Have you ever done something particularly silly and then kept doing it repeatedly, as if constant practice would somehow render it less stupid? And, no, I’m not talking about golf. Well, I find myself in the midst of just such a pursuit. I am bound and determined to achieve a straight 25x25 at 16-yard ATA trap. Yes, I know that trap has absolutely nothing to do with any other form of shotgun shooting, whether feathered or clay. Time spent at trap is never going to make up for the Orvis “double on grouse” pin that I never got, having muffed my one and only chance at a pair in the air. 

But that’s only part of it.  My gun of choice for this trap escapade is a Model 42. Yes, the .410 is called “the idiot stick” for good reason. In this case it might be more appropriate to call it “the idiot’s stick.” But I love my little pumper, and this gives it something to do during the long hot summer.

The average 16-yard trap target is taken at around 32 yards, give or take a bit. My 42 has a factory Full choke of about .015”. At 30 yards that might possibly give me about a 75-percent pattern. One of these days I’ll have to actually pattern the brute even though I’ve been told that patterning a .410 only leads to heartbreak. If I use No. 8s, technically nowhere in my pattern will I have sufficient density to reliably break a bird. I use a 95-percent chance of a one-pellet strike, which equals an 80-percent chance of a two-pellet hit, which equals a 50-percent chance of a three-pellet hit, as my criterion, because somebody else once did the math for me. If I go to No. 8-1/2s, with their extra 40 pellets, technically I will have a 10-inch-wide killing pattern that meets my criteria. No. 8-1/2s it is. Who said you can’t cure stupid?

So I have been flailing away from the 16-yard line with my 1/2 oz of No. 8-1/2s. If the moon is right and the tide is out, I can break 20. More than that has so far escaped me. The funny thing is that when I center a bird, it blows up pretty nicely. No smoke or anything so tastelessly tacky, but a nice solid break. Of course, if I am just the tiniest bit off, nothing happens. With a 12 or even a 28, you have a workable pattern fringe that makes up for at least a little aiming error. Not so with the .410. Then there is the middle ground. That’s the worst. Sometimes I feel that I am dead-solid perfect on the bird and nothing happens. That’s the heartbreak of the idiot stick.

Maybe Albert Einstein was at least half right when he said, “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.”

Do you ever fool around with the .410? Has your sanity survived?

That’s it for the dark side. Boots off. Beer open.