Down in the 42nd parallel south, it’s not been too bad this year relatively speaking, considering what you fellas are going through. However, despite mostly dodging the Covid crisis, the wife and I decided that Q4 2020 we would indulge in a bit of random injury requiring surgical repair. I severed tendons in the back of my right hand and the wife broke her foot. Both of us were somewhat limited physically for the best part of three months.
So this summer holiday has a lot of built in expectation. First time on the hill country farm since early October, followed by a month of touring the back blocks of the central North Island, Hawkes Bay and East Cape, visiting mates on their farms and hunting / fishing / swimming / boogie boarding our way back to fitness. Fitness which is very easily lost in middle age, and hard to regain.
We left home the day after the schools closed for Christmas, and were set up and ready to go on an evening hunt that night. The weather was hot and humid, proper sweaty crack weather, no wind to speak of and an overcast sky. Having had no rain to speak of for 10 days, the farm tracks were hard and dusty, and we drove the Hilux up into the back country to start the hunt in a leisurely manner, the wife’s foot being a bit of an unknown in her new Lowa boots.
(You would have to have a death wish to drive a 4WD pickup up these farm tracks after 15 minutes of rain. It has to be bone dry. Conditions go from safe to lethal in a flash. Fancy losing traction and sliding backwards down a 1:3 hill, with a switchback 20m behind you and a 200m roll down the 1:2 face.....? I’ll take that as a no.)
Pest control is now a massive problem - with me and the wife off duty for a few weeks and our partners busy with weaning / dipping & drenching and a significant land purchase next door, the deer numbers are now higher than ever. The hinds dropped their fawns in early November and had a bumper spring, so there’s no shortage of replacements. I don’t like shooting hinds with fawns at foot, so we decided to shoot spikers and young stags with crappy heads.
First up was the need to secure some camp meat. We wandered slowly down a spur that flattens out before dropping vertically down to the valley floor in a series of bluffs that in days gone by held hundreds of goats. On the other side of the valley about 500m away there were several reds browsing their way down the face in the evening sun. If we were quick we would be able to nail one before it browsed too close to the really steep slope, that inevitably leads to the animal rolling too far down for an effective recovery.
I set up the 6.5 and the wife called the range on a fat young 2yr old stag - 480m - I waited for the animal to turn broadside before sending the 143gr ELD-X in through the shoulder and out the other side. The animal dropped to the shot and tumbled downslope through a thick thistle patch, before stopping in a convenient little dip. A smaller and quite runty two-year-old was stupid enough to want to find out what happened to his mate, instead of running off like the rest of the mob, so it bought an ELD-X too. Unfortunately it stumbled straight downhill before collapsing and rolling, the momentum being enough to tip it over the edge of the bluff into freefall, landing hard some 40-50m down and continuing to roll down into the thick valley bottom scrub. One for me, one for the pigs.
Something common to lots of hunting Internet forums is of course the never-ending argument about cartridges, calibers and bullets. Is it enough gun, etc etc etc. I like arguing about this stuff. As a steadfast proponent of accuracy over raw power, I hope these kinds of examples demonstrate what I’m going on about. The exit wound in this photo is pretty typical of what the 6.5mm ELD-X will do to a decent sized red deer at half a click. It’s a reliable longer range bullet but as with most hunting bullets at a terminal velocity of ~2,100 ft./sec, it does its best work when initial expansion is through the nearside shoulder blade. Get that right, and its lights out.
After a gentle stroll around the head of the valley for a good while, and recovering the backstraps, hind quarters and velvet antlers, we headed back to the truck. It was good to see the wife’s boots were doing the business with the added load, and she wasn’t getting too much discomfort from the 3 titanium screws in her right foot. She’s tough as, built from Vereeniging steel and Kimberly diamonds I reckon.
Next day was too hot and humid to do much more than swat a fly, drink ale and afternoon nap. Come evening time is was looking more promising, so me and my huntress climbed the hill behind the cabin and engaged in a spot of glassing. We were turning up deer left, right and centre, but we wanted a nice close recoverable spiker to give to the old fella in the homestead down the way as thanks for general stock shifting and water checks during our enforced absence. Pretty soon we spotted some spikes just the other side of a spur some 3 or 4 hundred yards away, before the animal ducked down and was gone out of sight. To minimise our wind the wife stalked to the top of the ridge while I went down to the track below, with us advancing on the deer from above and below. We carry UHF handsets for comms on the hill, and to stay in touch with our boys back at the cabin, and have a well rehearsed series of Morse-like clicks to indicate what we can see. With the telltale five short clicks I knew she was on, so I replied with the same a short while later as the spiker browsed out of cover into my field of view. Next second - BANG - and the trusty Tikka .308 sang out. I watched the spiker fall flat on its brisket and die right there. Good shot wife.
The Trijicon 2.5-10x56 AccuPoint I recently acquired is fantastic in low light, really hoovers up the light and turns dusk into day. The illuminated crosshair dot is extremely effective, combined with the clarity and unfussy eye box its been a really good purchase. The Mildot reticle delivers near perfect ballistic drops for my 18” .308 barrel; with a 200m zero, the dots correspond to 300m, 400m, 475m and 550m, with the top of the post at 600m.
The next comment to make is the DRT terminal performance of the Speer 165gr BTSP. I’ve been using this bullet for a while now, and been impressed by its ability to clean drop big deer at all ranges, so much so I bought 1,000 of them cheaply and now don’t have to worry about .308 Win for years. This closer range (~100m?) shot delivered the standard bang flop and front shoulder damage, not that we’re worried about that because the front shoulder is dog tucker at best when not shot through with fragmentation. Clean killing is our #1 objective, and this spiker knew nothing. More on this in a moment.
The following two days were washed out with rain, which we were expecting and had come prepared for. Tournament Scrabble, competitive MineCraft, poker lessons, lots of history docos and some wet walks in the misty conditions. Strangely the deer were very shy of the rain and stayed in the bush. The short breaks in the weather showed up very few animals. We managed to squeeze in some gong shooting in between showers, teaching the kids the basics with the .223, .243 and 6.5mm.
Once the rain cleared, a cold and entirely unseasonal chill descended on the valley, which necessitated a log-burner fire on Christmas Day, which is completely unheard of. The wind was from the south east, equally unheard of, presenting some unusual stalking opportunities. I set off with the wife as soon as we could, and moved in on a normally fairly inaccessible basin that always holds reds at deer o’clock, but is normally next to impossible to hunt because the prevailing wind (westerly) gives the deer a several hundred metre head start.
We walked around the bushline for a couple of hours, peeking over the edge of the ridge. We spotted a red spiker, alone in the middle of a tussock patch, lying down in the sun. It was around 900m away, with lots of relatively easy ground we could make up out of sight, so we launched stealth mode and crept in, aiming for the last ridge-line and shooting position before open country with no cover. Tactics was important, point-to-point moves with a careful eye on the geography to ensure we weren’t detected. We set up on the ridge at exactly 300m range and waited to see what the spiker would do. The wife again had the .308 and practiced some dry fires with the new scope and reticle, before chambering a round and settling in.
At precisely deer o’clock, several large pigs emerged from the bush, followed by a couple of reds, one a large heavy stag. This put the wind up our spiker, who stood up and shaped to gap it. Just as we thought it would run after all that effort, it instead turned and faced the stag, standing broadside, and without a hesitation the wife sent a Speer straight through the spiker’s hilar.
A successful hilar shot is a spectacular DRT, especially for the spotter. The animal literally flipped over backwards as his CNS scrambled, and a huge plume of bright red lung blood erupted from its nose. It thrashed for a few seconds before lying still in a perfect position for recovery. We set off, me doing my best - but failing - not to over congratulate my wife. She’s a damn good shot and has retained all that calmness and patience from her Army training.
So this summer holiday has a lot of built in expectation. First time on the hill country farm since early October, followed by a month of touring the back blocks of the central North Island, Hawkes Bay and East Cape, visiting mates on their farms and hunting / fishing / swimming / boogie boarding our way back to fitness. Fitness which is very easily lost in middle age, and hard to regain.
We left home the day after the schools closed for Christmas, and were set up and ready to go on an evening hunt that night. The weather was hot and humid, proper sweaty crack weather, no wind to speak of and an overcast sky. Having had no rain to speak of for 10 days, the farm tracks were hard and dusty, and we drove the Hilux up into the back country to start the hunt in a leisurely manner, the wife’s foot being a bit of an unknown in her new Lowa boots.
(You would have to have a death wish to drive a 4WD pickup up these farm tracks after 15 minutes of rain. It has to be bone dry. Conditions go from safe to lethal in a flash. Fancy losing traction and sliding backwards down a 1:3 hill, with a switchback 20m behind you and a 200m roll down the 1:2 face.....? I’ll take that as a no.)
Pest control is now a massive problem - with me and the wife off duty for a few weeks and our partners busy with weaning / dipping & drenching and a significant land purchase next door, the deer numbers are now higher than ever. The hinds dropped their fawns in early November and had a bumper spring, so there’s no shortage of replacements. I don’t like shooting hinds with fawns at foot, so we decided to shoot spikers and young stags with crappy heads.
First up was the need to secure some camp meat. We wandered slowly down a spur that flattens out before dropping vertically down to the valley floor in a series of bluffs that in days gone by held hundreds of goats. On the other side of the valley about 500m away there were several reds browsing their way down the face in the evening sun. If we were quick we would be able to nail one before it browsed too close to the really steep slope, that inevitably leads to the animal rolling too far down for an effective recovery.
I set up the 6.5 and the wife called the range on a fat young 2yr old stag - 480m - I waited for the animal to turn broadside before sending the 143gr ELD-X in through the shoulder and out the other side. The animal dropped to the shot and tumbled downslope through a thick thistle patch, before stopping in a convenient little dip. A smaller and quite runty two-year-old was stupid enough to want to find out what happened to his mate, instead of running off like the rest of the mob, so it bought an ELD-X too. Unfortunately it stumbled straight downhill before collapsing and rolling, the momentum being enough to tip it over the edge of the bluff into freefall, landing hard some 40-50m down and continuing to roll down into the thick valley bottom scrub. One for me, one for the pigs.
Something common to lots of hunting Internet forums is of course the never-ending argument about cartridges, calibers and bullets. Is it enough gun, etc etc etc. I like arguing about this stuff. As a steadfast proponent of accuracy over raw power, I hope these kinds of examples demonstrate what I’m going on about. The exit wound in this photo is pretty typical of what the 6.5mm ELD-X will do to a decent sized red deer at half a click. It’s a reliable longer range bullet but as with most hunting bullets at a terminal velocity of ~2,100 ft./sec, it does its best work when initial expansion is through the nearside shoulder blade. Get that right, and its lights out.
After a gentle stroll around the head of the valley for a good while, and recovering the backstraps, hind quarters and velvet antlers, we headed back to the truck. It was good to see the wife’s boots were doing the business with the added load, and she wasn’t getting too much discomfort from the 3 titanium screws in her right foot. She’s tough as, built from Vereeniging steel and Kimberly diamonds I reckon.
Next day was too hot and humid to do much more than swat a fly, drink ale and afternoon nap. Come evening time is was looking more promising, so me and my huntress climbed the hill behind the cabin and engaged in a spot of glassing. We were turning up deer left, right and centre, but we wanted a nice close recoverable spiker to give to the old fella in the homestead down the way as thanks for general stock shifting and water checks during our enforced absence. Pretty soon we spotted some spikes just the other side of a spur some 3 or 4 hundred yards away, before the animal ducked down and was gone out of sight. To minimise our wind the wife stalked to the top of the ridge while I went down to the track below, with us advancing on the deer from above and below. We carry UHF handsets for comms on the hill, and to stay in touch with our boys back at the cabin, and have a well rehearsed series of Morse-like clicks to indicate what we can see. With the telltale five short clicks I knew she was on, so I replied with the same a short while later as the spiker browsed out of cover into my field of view. Next second - BANG - and the trusty Tikka .308 sang out. I watched the spiker fall flat on its brisket and die right there. Good shot wife.
The Trijicon 2.5-10x56 AccuPoint I recently acquired is fantastic in low light, really hoovers up the light and turns dusk into day. The illuminated crosshair dot is extremely effective, combined with the clarity and unfussy eye box its been a really good purchase. The Mildot reticle delivers near perfect ballistic drops for my 18” .308 barrel; with a 200m zero, the dots correspond to 300m, 400m, 475m and 550m, with the top of the post at 600m.
The next comment to make is the DRT terminal performance of the Speer 165gr BTSP. I’ve been using this bullet for a while now, and been impressed by its ability to clean drop big deer at all ranges, so much so I bought 1,000 of them cheaply and now don’t have to worry about .308 Win for years. This closer range (~100m?) shot delivered the standard bang flop and front shoulder damage, not that we’re worried about that because the front shoulder is dog tucker at best when not shot through with fragmentation. Clean killing is our #1 objective, and this spiker knew nothing. More on this in a moment.
The following two days were washed out with rain, which we were expecting and had come prepared for. Tournament Scrabble, competitive MineCraft, poker lessons, lots of history docos and some wet walks in the misty conditions. Strangely the deer were very shy of the rain and stayed in the bush. The short breaks in the weather showed up very few animals. We managed to squeeze in some gong shooting in between showers, teaching the kids the basics with the .223, .243 and 6.5mm.
Once the rain cleared, a cold and entirely unseasonal chill descended on the valley, which necessitated a log-burner fire on Christmas Day, which is completely unheard of. The wind was from the south east, equally unheard of, presenting some unusual stalking opportunities. I set off with the wife as soon as we could, and moved in on a normally fairly inaccessible basin that always holds reds at deer o’clock, but is normally next to impossible to hunt because the prevailing wind (westerly) gives the deer a several hundred metre head start.
We walked around the bushline for a couple of hours, peeking over the edge of the ridge. We spotted a red spiker, alone in the middle of a tussock patch, lying down in the sun. It was around 900m away, with lots of relatively easy ground we could make up out of sight, so we launched stealth mode and crept in, aiming for the last ridge-line and shooting position before open country with no cover. Tactics was important, point-to-point moves with a careful eye on the geography to ensure we weren’t detected. We set up on the ridge at exactly 300m range and waited to see what the spiker would do. The wife again had the .308 and practiced some dry fires with the new scope and reticle, before chambering a round and settling in.
At precisely deer o’clock, several large pigs emerged from the bush, followed by a couple of reds, one a large heavy stag. This put the wind up our spiker, who stood up and shaped to gap it. Just as we thought it would run after all that effort, it instead turned and faced the stag, standing broadside, and without a hesitation the wife sent a Speer straight through the spiker’s hilar.
A successful hilar shot is a spectacular DRT, especially for the spotter. The animal literally flipped over backwards as his CNS scrambled, and a huge plume of bright red lung blood erupted from its nose. It thrashed for a few seconds before lying still in a perfect position for recovery. We set off, me doing my best - but failing - not to over congratulate my wife. She’s a damn good shot and has retained all that calmness and patience from her Army training.
