STABLE GENIUS!

Tim Finley advises his fellow hunters to stick at it and get support

- Tim Finley

I said last time that a standing shot has to be the last resort for any hunter, no matter how good they think they are. I ‘stand’ 100% behind this. Standing shots are by far the hardest that any shooter can be forced to take, and I know from bitter experience. I missed all six standing shots on the last day of the World FT championships in 1996 to lose the title by two shots.

A bold statement coming up: FT and HFT shooters are better shots than the majority of hunters. Target shooters, by their very nature, train much more intensively and fire more shots than hunters. I know, I do both. Sometimes, you don’t fire a single shot when hunting; in fact, it’s the majority of the time. Even if you do fire a shot and hit a rabbit, unless you are shooting one of those very rare places now with many rabbits, that one rabbit will often be enough.

Of course, there are some tricks that HFT shooters could learn from hunters. When hunting there are no rules on shooting position, so whatever is stable and works is fair game; I’ve used, rocks, car bonnets, van doors, pallets, 45-gallon drums, agricultural machinery, logs, fenceposts, other shooters, shooting sticks and trees … the list goes on. You are allowed to use trees in HFT, but it’s not as easy as it looks, and you can still get it wrong if you don’t use the correct technique.

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