So having the opportunity for a tour round the factory was fascinating. I have never been that interested in the workings of a gun I simply want to put a cartridge in, and expect it to go bang. The factory visit was a fantastic experience. Paolo Zoli invited us over to the Zoli factory in Brescia to have a custom stock made for it.

So of course we ordered a Zoli Z Skeet, 12 gauge, with 28in barrels. It had a lovely smooth feel and went where I was looking – and this one didn’t even fit me. I thawed out over a cup of tea before heading out again with his Zoli Skeet gun – and I really liked it. It had a long custom stock to fit Chris, but even allowing for that the barrels felt whippy and too fast. On the Skeet range I tried Chris’s Perazzi first, and really struggled. We met Chris at Park Lodge SG one very cold and snowy November day. To cut a long story short, he put us in touch with Chris Little, who not only had a Perazzi Skeet gun but had also just taken delivery of the first Zoli Skeet gun to arrive into the UK. I’d never heard of Zoli but after a bit of Googling we called John, who turned out to be a lovely gentleman. We considered Beretta and Perazzi, but eventually came across a small advert from John Fawcett in Lancashire, promoting the Zoli brand. My husband John started to look into it for me. I was actually quite handy at OS, and to begin with the funding was excellent, so the training, coaching, clays and cartridges were all free. Even so, after many phone calls I caved in and went to try Olympic Skeet. The Olympics is a hard path, you have to travel all round the world and shoot in competitions, and if you win, you win a place for your country, not yourself.Īt the end of all those competitions, it’s down to the selectors to decide who goes – and back then it seemed they didn’t always select the best. Then around 2010 I was asked by a British Shooting coach to try Olympic Skeet – which, to be honest, I had no interest in whatsoever.

It was a cracking gun, but unless you set the beast up correctly it can make shooting rather hard work. It was probably around 20 years old, but it worked really well.īack then, I really wasn’t strong enough or competent enough to shoot a Krieghoff. Supposedly all that survived was the action, so it had new barrels and wood fitted. This was a reconditioned gun, rumoured to have been in a house fire.

I then moved on to my first Krieghoff K80 Super Sporter 30in. I started my shooting career with a Winchester 6500, and shot the poor thing until it just about fell to pieces.

Zoli shooting vests