From booking to the reel in your pocket.
A ClayFlight day is a simulated game day with a scoreboard added. Here's how it goes.
- 1
Book a day
Pick a ground and a date through Clay Days, add your group and turn up. You arrive between nine and half past, sign in, and get a coffee and a bacon roll. The host briefs you on safety and the running order. Nobody needs to have shot before. If you'd like an instructor or a loader beside you, book one with the day. It's an added cost and worth it for a first-timer.
- 2
Camera on, shoot a drive
A drive is fifteen to twenty-five minutes of clays coming over like a flush of partridge or pheasant, hundreds of them, for a line of six or more shooters. Before the first one a small camera clips to your gun and films every shot from the barrel's point of view. You don't press anything. You shoot.
- 3
Dock between drives
When the drive ends the cameras go into the dock at the hub, a laptop and a TV under cover. They charge, hand over the footage, and the system finds every shot and decides whether the clay broke. Anything it isn't sure about is flagged rather than guessed. The leaderboard is on the telly in about ten minutes, with elevenses.
- 4
Take it home
Four to six drives, lunch around one, done by mid-afternoon. Within five working days each shooter gets a scorecard and a reel of their best breaks by email, with a link to watch, download and send to the group chat while the argument is still fresh.
At the dock.
The hub is a laptop and a TV in the shelter or the clubhouse, with a row of USB-C ports. When a drive finishes, everyone hands their camera in and plugs it in.
While the cameras charge, the hub pulls that drive's footage off them, finds each shot and decides whether the clay broke. About four hundred shots a shooter over the day, each with a result.
In about ten minutes the leaderboard is on the TV. Cameras go back on the guns, and the next drive starts with everyone knowing where they stand.
What to bring.
Boots, old trousers, a waterproof. Light rain goes ahead. Eye and ear protection if you have it, the ground has spares if you don't. Tweed is welcome and so is a fleece.
You need to be eighteen or over, and to have public liability insurance (BASC, the Countryside Alliance or equivalent). Most grounds have guns to hire. Cartridges and clays are included in a Clay Days day.