Dear Charlie,

I want to thank you for imparting some of your optical knowledge and experience to me.
Here’s my story.

Background:

• Avid shotgun shooter and student of the game for 56 years
• Left handed
• Left dominant eyed

Disciplines:

• Sporting clays
• Wing shooting experience on multiple continents
• Previously-skeet, trap, and flyers

My work and age related eye issues have caused a deterioration of vision acuity in my left dominant eye has occurred leaving me with 20/30 corrected in my left eye and 20/15 corrected in my right or weak eye.

Frequently the right eye wants to be dominant especially if the target is a right to left crossing one. I tried teaching myself to wink (as many shot gunners do) at the point of hard focus and firing. This was very difficult for me as it required thinking about doing something instead of just watching the target. John David Shima is right as rain. (Book –The Moment of Truth)

I live by the old adage and quote, “How can a man think and hit at the same time?” Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra.

I have relied on shooting aids such as Vaseline, scotch tape, Spot Shot optical foils, friction tape, and other devices to blur or block central vision in the right eye when the gun is in the mounted position. After several days at a tournament, ones dominant eye becomes fatigued and the weak eye begins to find a way to establish more control. Looking around the dots is common and this results in poor or partial gun mounts.

I was intrigued when I read about your apertures and through several long listening sessions with you and a good bit of trial and error on my own, I have discovered that using the wide or “shotgun” sized aperture Eye Pal on my weak eye (in my mounted central vision position on my shooting glasses) that I can see through the aperture and have a depth of field with that eye. The right eye (the weak eye) doesn’t “grab” the target resulting in the misses that I was having with the other devices. I’m still experimenting and shooting with it and thus far am very pleased.

I want to order a number of them to have on hand for students and friends. Typically if you point with your forearm hand finger in front of your dominant eye you are pointing straight at the target object. If you close your master eye then the finger is no longer on the target object. With the Eye Pal the target “jump” experienced by this maneuver is minimized or non-existent. This is not what I expected. My eye fatigue that is normally present using solid dots is greatly relieved using the Eye Pal. This was a welcome experience.

I don’t have all the answers, but I’m intrigued and excited about the learning experience and the improvement in my consistency using the Eye Pal.

So far, we have learned that the handgun aperture is just a bit too small, so I was glad to see your larger “Shotgun” aperture in the mail recently. I’ll be happy to report on its affect at a later date.

The Eye Pal is easily moved from one set of glasses to another without harm and reuse is a snap.

For grins I put an Eye Pal on both eyes of my regular Rx glasses in the proper place and watched an Atlanta Braves baseball game. The depth of field improvement was quite remarkable.

What would happen if a softball pitcher or baseball pitcher used one on his master eye while pitching?

No matter, I thank you for your kindness in helping me. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I know that if it helped me that it’s highly likely that it will help others that are either cross dominant, central dominant, or shooting off the wrong shoulder.

Best wishes in your endeavor.

With great respect I am,
Greg