The Snake River Hunting Club holds an annual shooting contest for our deer hunting party and we call it the “Whooz Your Daddy” contest. We have been doing this for about 8 years now and we all look forward to it every year. The winner of the last contest “The DADDY” sets the rules for the next year contest. We hold the contest the day before the hunting season in an old railroad quarry. The contest is a hunting shooting contest meaning we only use our hunting rifles and try to make up rules to simulate what we might encounter in the field.

For the last several years we have hunted with muzzleloaders so a typical contest would be a five shot contest. This year was one shot at 75 yds off hand. One shot at 100 yds using whatever we would take to the field and hunt with, i.e. shooting sticks or bi-pods. Two shots timed, shoot once at 100 yds, re-load and shoot again at 200 yds in under 1 minute, these shots were to simulate shooting at a deer re-loading and shooting at the deer again at the longer range. The final shot was at 200 yds using whatever we would take to the field and hunt with.

The bragging rights go to the winner for the entire next year until we hold the contest again. As you can imagine all the fun goes to the winner. If we call him he always asks “Whooz your DADDY” and we have to stroke his ego by saying “you are” then we can get on to talking about whatever it was that we called about.

Our shooting site is big enough to take modern rifles and we hold a separate long distance shooting contest, we shoot at 300, 400, 500 and 576 yds ( 576 yds because that is all we can get out of our site). This has proven to be very useful because you can’t shoot at those ranges unless you practice at those ranges. This proved very beneficial for us in 2009 when Steve took his elk at 350 yds, Don took his elk at 430 yds with the final shot at 500 yds and I took my elk at 400 yds. Don also took a nice 4 point whitetail at 300 yds with a 25 knot cross wind.

If you want to spice up your hunting trip we recommend a pre-hunt shooting contest it will sharpen your skills put you in a pressure situation while shooting and be a lot of fun. I won’t tell you that we wager on this contest but the winner gets part of his hunt paid for well at least some of the gas money.

Mike “Nimrod” Tusow
2010 “Daddy” whooohooo