No. 75 Break 25 Straight

You shoot skeet for practice and to pass time until hunting season. But there is a score card, and you’ve always wanted to see a string of 25 Xs by your name. Summer is for milestones. This is your time. Skeet is equal parts shooting fundamentals and mind game. With eight stations and two houses, you have 16 different shots to master. Then you need the mental toughness to shoot a round of 25 without a mistake.

As target shooters will tell you, none of the shots on a skeet field are hard, but they’re all easy to miss. Any station can derail your straight, but there are two in particular that get most shooters. If you are going to hit 25 straight, you have to conquer station 4 and low-house 6.

High-House 4

The long crossers at station 4 (and 3 and 5 to a lesser degree) bedevil hunters because they require long leads that aren’t suited to the swing-though method many use in the field. Station 4’s high-house is the key word. If you aim or check your lead, you’ll stop the gun and miss behind. A maintained lead is deadly on crossing skeet targets, and it works on real birds too.