I became a fan of the 16-gauge in 1975, at age 12, during a south Arkansas deer hunt with my next door neighbor, Todd Hickingbotham.
Having been in the booking business for quite a while now, my key to a successful career was always great hunts in foreign countries, not just Canada (and a brief stint in Mexico) either, but really wonderful wingshooting places like Argentina, Bolivia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, England, France, and Scotland, plus South Africa. Covid put the kibosh on that for the past two years as most anybody knows, and the current state of the world, which is following the Ukraine/Russia conflict on an hourly basis, is not good, so travel has been down to say the least.
Remington Arms is expanding its presence in target shooting with two new sporting clays courses at its ammunition plant near Lonoke, Arkansas.
When it comes to teaching sporting clays, Darren Moore believes that most solutions are directed at problems that don’t actually exist.
Silicon Valley is known for miracles, if you will, that we now take for granted. Our everyday lives have been transformed by the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Twitter, Intel and eBay.
Ask Darius Anderson about his company Kenwood Investments, and he’ll tell you “we’re an opportunity fund that does things other people find very difficult.”
Let’s say it’s a crisp and bright Saturday morning and you slip on your favorite pair of old jeans and make that first cup of coffee, when a feeling of comfort and well-being washes over you. That’s the feeling of stepping into the Atkin Grant & Lang Shooting Ground.
When it comes to describing a state of bliss, the oft-used saying “I’ve died and gone to heaven” rises to the occasion when you pull into the parking lot of the Holland & Holland Shooting Grounds where, across the way, six Land Rovers with their chauffeurs mingling about, herald your arrival to England’s most luxurious shooting school.
It takes a special kind of genius to fit a guy with a ladies’ shotgun, teach him a new clays-shooting technique and then get him out on the course to start smashing targets all within the span of 90 minutes.
We climbed the narrow staircase from the bustling reception area of the West London Shooting School to the Stanbury Restaurant, where Kevin Phillips is at a table waiting for us.
It’s apparent that the waitress knows Mr. Phillips quite well. As Owner and Director of Sportarm, named the Best UK Gun Room for an unprecedented six times at the Shooting Industry Awards, he’s been working late into the night on the finishing touches of his third Sportarm in the adjacent old brick store. Christmas is 27 days away.
I’m standing in a waist-high grouse butt at the Royal Berkshire Shooting School in rural Pangbourne, England. Jonathan Irby, the school’s Managing Director, really wants me to make this shot: an incoming formation of four clay targets strafing the scrub at about 50 miles per hour. In a way, this shot is a test to see if I have the stuff for hunting the 20-ounce, acrobatic, mind-bending red grouse that can burst to speeds of nearly 80 miles per hour – exasperating wingshooters throughout the U.K. for the past 150 years.
Imagine if you will a place where children learn to blow a duck call before entering first grade. It is a place where the dress of the day from November through March is some brand of camo and a radio station’s call letters are KWAK. If you’re a duck hunter, you’ve most likely heard of this place. We’re talking about Stuttgart, Arkansas. It is a farm town of around 9,000 inhabitants. Most of those residents are in the farming business with rice being the primary crop.
The heaps of papers, folders and boxes in Dr. Rick Carlisle’s office conjure an Ivy-Tower academic in pursuit of a big cosmic revelation. But wait, what about his shirt? It’s a vented short-sleeve embroidered with a prominent Ames Plantation logo of two bobwhite quail on the wing.
Covering nearly 600 acres, Orvis Hill Country in Fairfield, Pennsylvania is the latest addition to the Orvis Shooting Grounds Collection – joining the flagship Orvis Sandanona in Millbrook, New York and Orvis Pursell Farms in Sylacauga, Alabama as America’s luxury sporting clays, upland hunting and shooting school destinations.
Irwin Greenstein
Publisher
Shotgun Life
PO Box 6423
Thomasville, GA 31758
Phone: 229-236-1632