I honestly remember being a better shot than this. In my mind’s eye, the last time I fired a gun, I picked off clay pigeons like a modern-day Daniel Boone. But now I feel as if I couldn’t hit the back end of a brontosaurus at 20 paces.

“Which is your dominant eye?” asks Ken Schrader, owner of Schrader’s Bridgetown Manor and my trapper, or “clay caddie,” for the afternoon.

“My left,” I reply, “but I’m right-handed.”

“There’s your problem,” he says. “You should be shooting lefty.”

The sensation of shouldering the Bereta .391 shotgun left-handed feels as awkward as following someone else’s lead on the dance floor, but I consent to give it a try.

“Pull,” I order feebly.

And wouldn’t you know it? I blast that clay—and the next three—to smithereens.

“Well, there you go,” says Schrader. “You’re a lefty.”

I have to give Schrader credit for his suggestion, but then, this is a guy who’s been guiding hunters and instructing greenhorns like me in marksmanship for 30 years. Now a boyish 45, at 16 years old he was already leading executives from McCormick Spice Co., Hardees, and other corporations on Eastern Shore hunting trips.

In 2004, he opened his own sportsmen’s retreat on 80 acres in Henderson in Caroline County. The massive 11-bedroom building itself, vaguely modeled after Mount Vernon, was built in 1989 as a private hunting club and literally appears to have been dropped among the cornfields. Schrader has been fixing up the exterior since he bought it but so far has left the decidedly motel-like guestrooms pretty much the same.

Of course, you don’t visit a hunting lodge to hang out inside, and Schrader provides guests with ample opportunity to get outdoors. He leases more than 25,000 acres on the Eastern Shore for hunting and offers guide services for a zoo of animals from upland birds (pheasant, chukar, quail, partridge) to waterfowl and whitetail deer. (The conservation-minded Schrader requires that hunters shoot only mature bucks with at least eight-point racks and no does.) He can also arrange fishing trips on the Bay and bass fishing in several nearby ponds. Also on the property is a 3-D archery course, in which archers shoot at foam, life-size targets of deer, wild boar, turkey, and other critters from varying distances and heights. It’s a unique experience, and at $12 per round of 30 targets, a very fun bargain. 

And then there’s the mile-long sporting clays course. “It’s like golf with a gun,” Schrader says as we make our way through the course’s 16 stations on a golf cart.

I continue my good luck on “Too Tall,” in which clays are triggered remotely from a 100-foot-tall tower and shooters must aim up at a 60-degree angle. But I return to my earlier futile ways at the next station where the clays fly low and quick from one edge of a wooded clearing to another. Throughout it all, the always upbeat Schrader offers his encouragement: “It’s a mind game. Don’t think about it. Follow the target, not the end of your gun. Follow through.” And finally, after another miss: “Hmm,
there must not have been any shot in that shell.”

It’s clear he’s instructed newbies before. “We take people who have never picked up a gun before to master shooters—some of the very best in the U.S. shoot here,” he says, noting that nearly a fifth of his clients are women. He also gets a lot of D.C. politicos, including a visit several years ago from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who went duck hunting. (No, there haven’t been any hunting incidents involving Dick Cheney.) Then there was the time one of his guides took Shaquille O’Neal goose hunting and the basketball star was too tall to keep his head from poking above the blind.

But everyone, Schrader says, no matter who they are, tends to leave with an appreciation for an Eastern Shore tradition. “They could be sitting out in a field and can’t believe they have all this [beauty] around them,” he says. “They love the atmosphere and love to live the Eastern Shore way.”

Schrader’s Bridgetown Manor offers a variety of packages involving sporting clays, hunting, and/or fishing. Most include accommodations and dinner at the manor house. See schradershunting.com or call 410-758-1824 for complete information.