Interesting Day at the 5-Stand

Once in a great while you get an opportunity to step out of the box and do something very special and memorable; such was this occasion. Michael Waddell and his dad Edwin were visiting MidwayUSA to discuss their upcoming TV show “Booger Bottoms”, a reality show, based on the hectic schedule of Michael and his family at their home near Woodbury, Georgia.

One of our scheduled activities was to shoot clay pigeons at the 5-Stand on Midway Farms. It was my responsibility to supply the guns. Typically I would provide a gun for each shooter, but thinking outside the box, it seemed appropriate to put a different gun and ammo at each of the five stations and rotate the shooters through the various guns. This could make it a more memorable event – wow!

So, I picked some of my favorite guns, a dandy little Holland and Holland 410 side-by side, weighing under six pounds, at station one; and an old Parker hammer-style, side-by-side, 10 gauge, weighing over eight pounds, at station five. Station two had a Winchester Model 12 28 gauge pump, station three was a Purdey O/U 20 gauge, and station four was my Fabbri O/U 12 ga. Five guns, five

gauges, three had double triggers and two had automatic safeties. Add to that the differences in weight and balance and the flight paths of seven different targets and you can envision that it was a real “thinking” game – overload, you might say. We all had to make multiple excuses.

Our schedule was 2:30 to 4:30 in the afternoon – for the best light; and wouldn’t you know, it was pouring down rain. But the 5-stand at the Farm is just a 30 foot by 60 foot covered picnic shelter, built over a ditch so we could set traps # 1 and #7 under the floor. The clouds and rain made it a little difficult to see, especially the lower-flying birds – which was one of the excuses I used for misses.

We shot three rounds and regularly someone would forget to switch triggers on the double trigger guns, or forget to push the safety forward on the automatic safety guns. Two shooters pulled both triggers at once on the 10 gauge (wow), which made a lot of noise and created the most embarrassment – trying out multiple excuses. Most importantly though, the Waddell boys from rural Georgia represented their state quite well.