Yesterday we had the Prescott Cup for 2023 at North Cornwall Shooting Ground.

This competition is normally meant to be shot over 2 days, but this year, with everything going up in price, and mindful that 2 days of shooting might be a stretch for some people right now, the decision was made to reduce it to just one day instead.

Hello readers!

Thank you once again for your support and interest in the wanderings and adventures of a lowly trap shooter from Devon, and for your patience over recent months.

A competition entry of only 13 shooters, and 4 of them shooting 100 straight – with the top 3 just 1 point away from each other.

Sometimes, taking a break from something can be a good thing. In my case, not shooting for about a month and a half (had to watch the finances) helped recharge the batteries a bit.

After a two-week break that did me a lot of good, I was down at Two Counties Shooting Ground for their Christmas shoot. What a day to pick to get back out on the range! It was freezing, despite the thermal under layer, 3 more on top of that, and the insulated trousers!

My car told me it was 4 degrees when I left home at around 8am, and the same on the way home at about 4pm. In-between didn't feel much different!

This weekend has been a mixed one for me. I didn't shoot on Saturday because I had other things I needed to do, and around mid-morning I saw the very sad news on Facebook that Dennis Stepney, one of the partners of UK Gun Repairs, had passed away after a long illness. I've spent a lot of time at UKGR over the years with him and Brian, buying cartridges, guns, loitering in the workshop, and just listening to the stories and gunsmithing know-how going back and forth between them and clients.

Today was one of those days when you find yourself asking, “What are we doing here?”

Somehow, we’ve been blessed with dry days on the shooting range for months and months, but as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. I should have known better than to hope against hope that the steady and persistent rain drumming on my window at 6am this morning, and that was a constant feature of my hour and a half drive to Bradford, would miraculously stop when I got there.

Brook Bank was the venue of choice for today, primarily so that I could obtain some Fiocchi Superblacks and see what happened when I fed them to the Krieghoff. The Invictus really likes them, so the expectations were quite high!

Today was the first time out with the gun after a couple of weekends working with clients, and I decided to head down to North Cornwall and give the Krieghoff another workout. He’s been sat in the cabinet since the English and British Single Barrel weekend, waiting for a new pitch spacer and pad to arrive, and for me to fit them.

This is another report written the day after, as it took me twice as long to get home from Two Counties as usual due to a pedestrian fatality and multi-vehicle pile-up on the A38 earlier in the day. What’s usually an hour and a half trip turned into a three-hour navigation exercise! At least I’ve seen some parts of Devon that are new to me, and learned a new route home if needed.