It's sim-ply the best fun

Sim days have become a crowded market, and Simon Reinhold advises on how to avoid amateur mistakes when setting up your own

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There are degrees of seriousness to clay shooting. To set up and run a sim game operation that turns a profit is no easy task. At the outset, you have to ask yourself one simple question: how many weekends are you and your family prepared to sacrifice? And you must be honest with the answer because many of your clients will only want to come at weekends. Even at the other end of the scale — looking to have fun shooting driven clays with friends — there are some things you need to get right for everyone to have a safe and enjoyable time.

Testing clays

In my late teens I set up and ran my first clay shoots with my best friend. The chosen charity was MacMillan Nurses, who had looked after his father when he was fighting a losing battle with cancer. We wanted to give back to those who had helped him. With all the arrogance of youth, we had little idea of the detail and focused mainly on the end result — testing clays over small teams of Guns.

We were looking to recreate a pheasant drive, but in reality we created a hugely entertaining flurry pool shoot. Thanks to many staunchly supportive friends, it worked well for several years in a row. It raised money and a good time was had by all. Looking back, I’m horrified at some of the risks we took: hoisting manual traps up trees on to platforms made of old doors that were, in effect, repurposed tree houses from our early teens.

But back then there was little advice available and far fewer ambulance-chasing lawyers. Everyone involved was known by us and there were no novice shooters. Had something gone wrong, however, we would have been looking at some pretty daunting legal bills.