1320h.: The ND neglects to mention that the skeetshooting is a competitive Organized Activity. The charge is $1.00 a shot, but you have to purchase your shots in sets of 10, and there’s a large and vaguely gun-shaped plaque for the best X/10 score. I arrive at 8-Aft late; a male Nadirite is already shooting skeet, and several other men have formed a line and are waiting to shoot skeet. The Nadir’s wake is a big fizzy V way below the aft rail. Two sullen Greek NCOs run the show, and between their English and their earmuffs and the background noise of shotguns — plus the fact that I’ve never touched any kind of gun before and have only the vaguest idea of which end even to point — negotiations over my late entry and the forwarding of the skeetshooting bill to Harper’s are lengthy and involved.
I am seventh and last in line. The other contestants in line refer to the skeet as “traps” or “pigeons,” but what they really look like is tiny discuses painted the Day-Glo orange of high-cost huntingwear. The orange, I posit, is for ease of visual tracking, and the color must really help, because the trim bearded guy in aviator glasses currently shooting is perpetrating absolute skeetocide in the air over the ship.
I assume you already know the basic skeetshooting conventions from movies and TV: the lackey at the weird little catapultish device, the bracing and pointing and order to Pull, the combination thud and kertwang of the catapult, the brisk crack of the weapon, and the midair disintegration of the luckless skeet. Everybody in line with me is male, though there are a number of females in the crowd that’s watching the competition from the 9-Aft balcony above and behind us.
From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) skeetshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who’s replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these fluorescent skeet away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir’s wake; (c) a flying skeet, 129 when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia — erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a distinctive corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Striking thing (b) turns out to be an illusion, one not unlike the illusion I’d had about the comparative easiness of golf from watching golf on TV before I’d actually ever tried to play golf. The shooters who precede me do all seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and they all get 8/10 or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are insufferable East-Coast retro-Yuppie brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their “Papa” in southern Canada, and the last has not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own skeetshooting range in his backyard 130 in North Carolina. When it’s finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else’s ear-oil on them and don’t fit my head. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I’m told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two Yuppie brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek non-coms seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to “be bracing a hip” against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against no not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm — my initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.
OK, let’s not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own skeetshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants’ scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating shooting skeet from the rolling stern of a 7NC Megaship, and then we’ll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone in the vicinity who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips passed down from Papa. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to “lead” the launched skeet, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun’s barrel should move across the sky with the skeet or should instead lie in a sort of static ambush along some point in the skeet’s projected path. (3) TV skeetshooting is not totally unrealistic in that you really are supposed to say “Pull” and the weird little catapultish thing really does produce a kertwanging thud. (4) Whatever a “hair trigger” is, a shotgun does not have one. (5) If you’ve never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (6) The well-known “kick” of a fired shotgun is no misnomer: it does indeed feel like being kicked, and hurts, and sends you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which, when you’re holding a gun, results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above.