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Team Zespy ‘ignites’ a warm CVOA
welcome
at annual Homecoming Range event
By John McCatherin 
CARRABASSETT
VALLEY -- From the opening fireball of an explosive round hitting a
flammable target, the shotgun-toting antics of Team Zespy kept an audience of
over a hundred at rapt attention during their performance at the Carrabassett
Valley Outdoor Association’s annual range homecoming event Sunday (Oct. 9).
Jerome Holt of Bethel and Colin
Micklon of Fryeburg fired their way through hundreds of shells and clays for
over an hour, eliciting dozens of rounds of applause from the large crowd
enjoying the show and a sun-drenched view of the foliage of Bigelow Mountain in
the background.
“In all my days on ranges, I’ve
never seen anything like it in my life,” remarked long-time shooter and CVOA Range
Chairman Neal Trask. “They did things
with firearms that I would have never believed possible.”
The Team Zespy duo, hand-throwing as
many as eight clays at a time into the sky, would methodically bring them down
in pieces, sometimes firing shotguns upside-down or throwing guns back and
forth to each other before firing.
Holt and Micklon themselves, and members of
the audience, would challenge the two shooters to try new tricks, like throwing
a shotgun back and forth twice, loading it and firing before the clay could hit
the ground. They tried it and succeeded.
The two shooters will be featured in
a Bill Green’s Maine segment on WCSH-TV at 7 p.m. Oct. 29.
Their performance was all part of a
day-long range event coordinated by Range Secretary John McCatherin that opened with a
three-hour session of trap shooting. Dozens of shooters went through about 1,200 rounds during the morning
session under the watchful eyes of Range Officers Sherie Packard and Jim
Heichel.
“I think we made a lot of new
friends today,” McCatherin said. “We
picked up a number of new members and many of the trap shooters said they’d be
back to shoot here again.”
Then the shooters, guests and
workers lined up for a CVOA-barbecue of chicken, burgers and hot dogs along
with volunteer-provided salads, side dishes and desserts, a feed coordinated by
Barbara Kovach. As he has done before,
former chef Jim Wilson presided at the grills.
Another major feature of the day was
the dedication of two new projects developed by Eagle Scout candidates of the
CVOA-sponsored Boy Scout Troop #525.
Ian Wilson of Carrabassett Valley
conceived, designed and, with fellow volunteers, built an archery range that
includes a static range and a hundred yards or so of woods trails with targets tucked
into the woods like a hunter would encounter.
Matt Beauregard’s project was a 10 x 20 foot canopy mounted on utility
poles covering the firing line of CVOA’s hundred-yard long rifle range. Matt’s project also included the four new
shooting tables built with hemlock and pressure-treated woods that will
withstand the ravages of the weather at the range.
Also available for view was the nearly-finished meeting and storage
building designed and built by CVOA members. In fact, the lumber was donated by Treasurer Peter Weston who milled it
from trees he cut on his own property in Scarborough.
The project was supervised by long-time builder and CVOA member Harvey
Packard and a crew of mostly-retired member/volunteers. After one day recently when volunteers
finished staining the building and installing the metal roof, Packard, the
youngest of the crew at 70, remarked that the ages of the five-man crew that
day totaled about 360 years.
“If that building survives as long as we all have,” Packard joked, “then
we ought to get our money’s worth.”
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