This spring, an awkward mix of politics, unusual weather, money and harsh practical realities resulted in the decision to cull deer to waste on our old hunting block. Despite their best efforts to appease the neighbours, the new owners couldn't get aerial culling worked out to everyone's satisfaction. Meanwhile, the deer numbers continue to explode, something that's been noted throughout the region, due to the mild winters and high growth springs that follow. So off we went again, to chase deer and see how many we could get.
Culling to waste is a very difficult shift in mindset. Me and my two mates have always been uncomfortable with it, and we made a pact to recover as many deer as we could, or at least as much quality meat as we could recognising that whole animals are nigh on impossible to get out from much of the country, as it’s way too steep. It doesn’t really make sense though. A deer is just a grass stealing, manuka munching, pollen robbing ungulate pest just the same as a goat. Why we are so much more sensitive about them than goats is illogical really.
The initial reconnaissance showed the red deer were skittish and staying mostly up the back blocks on the higher country. The fallow were also nervous but staying low in their customary haunts. It was clear from the get go we’d be relying on mostly longer range shooting to get onto the reds, which isn’t a productive form of culling, for as soon as you’ve put the first shot into the mob, the rest scarper. But we were confident of being able to take out some closer range younger animals, as we were seeing last year’s yearlings wandering around looking a bit lost, having been recently ejected by their mothers ahead of this spring’s fawning.
I had the first evening to myself as Mate #1 wasn’t arriving until later the next day. I climbed up onto a ridgeline above the cattle flats, to scout for fallow. I wanted some camp meat and reckoned I’d be in with a better chance if I got some altitude and a wide field of view. Good decision – one directly below me at 305yd, another two away to the right at 425yd, lying down. I had the 18” .308 with the Z-600 Zeiss reticle on the 3-15x44, I love this BDC as it makes accurate holds really easy as soon as you know your range. I bowled the recoverable closer fallow and watched him tumble to an easy to reach position, before turning my attention to the other two to the right, who not surprisingly were now standing.
I really dithered over these two shots. I knew I wasn’t going to get to them that evening, with only half an hour of light left. But my mission objectives were clear: shoot deer, to waste if required. Fark it’s a hard thing to do, especially with fallow. But it is what it is, and they each bought a Speer 165gr BTSP, dropping them on the spot.
This Speer is a newish bullet to me, I bought some because I was disgusted with the Sierra price increases we’ve seen down here (since, coincidentally or not, the Tipped GameKing / GameChanger was introduced). These Speers are soft and quite brutal on small deer at close range, but in the 300-500yd class they are fantastic killers. Now they are proven to me, I’ve bought 1,000 of them and I’m sticking. The only other bullet I’ll use in the .308 is the much tougher 180gr RN ProHunter, for close range woods stalking.
I walked down the ridge to the ATV and drove around to collect my little fallow yearling.
Once Mate #1 had arrived, the selection of rifles was, er, abundant. There was a plan to do some video but I’m not really into that as it takes too much time away from the important business of attaching high velocity lead to animal. It’s really annoying when someone faffs around with cameras only for the deer to browse off the clearing and into cover! Having said that, in hindsight I wish we had done more, maybe next time. It would be good to actually show you fellas more of what we do in “real time” so to speak. We did however get a couple of half decent efforts done and my new camera worked better than I expected.
The second day started well, with Mate #1 flattening a hind at 460yd with his 7mm SAUM. The deer were standing right at the bottom of a long face down to one of the lethal gorges we have here, and not for the first time they ran towards the shooting position, a strange phenomenon that I think it a function of reflected sound from the faces behind them. Mate #1 is shooting the 162gr 7mm A-Max and man how it poleaxes deer when put into the shoulder. Unfortunately, no sooner had he decked it, he realised he had a problem with the next round from the new batch of reloads – they were jamming in the lands. Initial assessment suggested a problem he’d had before – a subtlety different shape to the ogive. I haven’t got any more info on this yet, will be interesting to see if he can prove it.
(One thing that was a recurring theme on this trip was the confusion caused by a mix of MRAD and MOA scopes set up to use metres and yards, and only one rangefinder that will work reliably on wet and misty days. Take it from me, it’s not a good idea. Big ups for the Vortex that worked, and no ups at all for the Leica that quite often wouldn’t.)
So from that point on it was either watch me, or use my 6.5 Creedmoor with the 143gr ELD-X. This was a bit like asking a coal miner to drink a glass of rosé at the end of his shift. I switched to the .308 and we wandered up a ridgeline into the breeze, before long we spied another two hinds browsing off a small clearing on a spur running away from us. We each lined up on an animal and rehearsed the old favourite “1, 2, 3, pop” with a couple of dry fires, then did it for real in almost perfect unison. The deer were at exactly 400yd and both crashed to the ground in a heap.
Mate #1 instantly fell in love with his hipster bearded, strawberry craft beer loving, soy latté sipping Creedmoor and tried to keep it. After some entertaining discussion about Creedmoors and crusty old men and their Mauser 98s, I further demonstrated the Howa’s accuracy by bowling over a hare at 458m.
6.5 Creedmoor. The cartridge of choice for the modern man with the tactical beard....
After a challenging walk dodging some ferocious showers, there was a flurry of activity the moment the sun came out. The deer appeared from the sheltering scrub just as magically as Mr Benn’s shopkeeper, though they were on the other side of the valley. The wind was favourable, from behind but sufficiently across not to wind us. Light rain returned but the deer stayed out, so back to business. Two shots were taken with the Creedmoor, the first at 523m.
The second at 497m sent a good stag rolling down the hill with a fountain of claret spewing from his offside. This second Creedmoor shot was filmed, it’s a bit grainy but you can see what happens. In the interest of reflecting on what can (and will) happen from time-to-time with this kind of shooting, you can see the animal take a step just as I pull the trigger. The learning here was that I was waiting too long with my left eye closed and the right eye in the ocular lens, and the sight eye was getting tired. No excuses, I put the shot too far back, an estimated 3-4” further back than the high shoulder I had planned. Hence the rear legs were paralysed but not the front legs. However, this example of a poor shot demonstrates the critical important of using a quality bullet with a good balance of penetration and frangibility. Note the dramatic exit wound and profuse bleeding – a fountain of blood. Coupled with partial paralysis, the deer died very quickly where he lay, just out of shot, in a matter of seconds. We scooted up the track a bit further to see him lying there, weirdly right next to another dead deer, one that had obviously been there a long time.
If I had used a hard, non-fragmenting bullet at this range, I doubt we would have seen the utter destruction of the rear lungs (and possibly the liver).
The first Creedmoor shot on the hind was one we wanted to recover, but couldn’t get to due to very poor and dangerous track conditions. We managed to get up there a few days later, by which time the animal was about to explode. Annoying, but that’s just the way it goes. But the photo shows the conditions and country reasonably well. Red SP for “shooting position”.
Something semi-technical to reflect upon. When you’re hunting steep country like this, it’s relatively easy to get an accurate range on an animal as long as there’s little moisture in the air. Contrast this to trying to range an animal in flat country; it’s all too easy to pick up a range on an object that is well before, or well behind, the animal that you want to shoot in flat country. Then, consider the trajectory of the bullet – at 500m+ my 6.5mm ELD-X is travelling at 2060fps but at quite a steep downward angle as it slows and falls. You can see this angle with the strike of the bullet on that stag, very close to or in the spine, but exiting just below the midline of the torso. This angle of impact generally does a lot of damage, often more than a flat shot that's a bit too far back – it’s much more forgiving. As a general rule, on days when wind isn’t a deterrent, we’re 100% comfortable with these kind of shots in steep country. Just remember to keep both eyes open until just before you finalise your shot.
We stayed up on the hill waiting for deer o’clock, walking over into an adjoining watershed that I was pretty confident we’d not spooked up too much. We switched to walk and stalk mode with the .308, and right on cue we walked into two plump yearlings and a scraggly looking spiker. Mate #1 was rifleman for the evening, and as I called ranges he whacked the deer, three shots in quick succession bang bang bang, at 315yd, and two at 200yd.
We decided against taking the farthest red spiker as it hadn’t fared particularly well over winter. The two smaller yearlings were also pretty ordinary but worth recovering, and were promptly cut up and packed out back to the ATV. All up, a productive day in which lots of lessons were learned about the conditions and the location of the deer.
Next day was a washout, hopeless weather. We managed one deer at 300yd in the morning which is in my notes but I can’t even remember it, as I was entirely focussed on not having to get out of the ATV. That evening the weather cleared enough to encourage us to get out and look for goats down by the yards, which we duly found, and knocked over with the .223s, eight in all. I use a 50gr at 3,400fps in my 1:12” twist, Mate #1 uses a 75gr ELD-M in his 1:8” twist. Here’s two typical smelly grass thieves. They weigh around 45kg, certainly not as big as some I’ve shot, fairly average really. That’s almost twice the weight of a typical roe buck. Our large, mature goats are roughly the weight of a fallow doe.
I really like the 1:8” .223s. There is a very strong argument in my mind to drop the .243 Win altogether for this kind of shooting, the muzzle blast from the ~25gr of powder in the .223 is nothing compared to the ~46gr in the .243. Considering they are both throwing the same weight projectile, that’s a helluva difference, and no animal alive in this country is going to know the difference between the two cartridges’ respective velocity (3,400fps for my 6mm 75gr V-Max, 3,000fps for the 5.56mm 75gr ELD-M). Sitting next to a .223 shooter and spotting is a much less hazardous occupation hearing-wise than with the .243, that’s just a reality. The .223 is such an efficient little cartridge.
The next day was the last chance to get out the 28 Nosler and 195gr Berger VLD Hunting and go for some proper long-range deer. We were pretty sure by now where they were and how we would reach them, but alas the wet and misty conditions meant the expensive Leica rangefinder wouldn’t perform at all, whereas the Vortex worked 50-60% of the time. The mob we wanted to target was at around 875yd – no chance of that in the conditions - but a hind and her yearling popped up in the closer gully at 660yd. That deer was also hit slightly behind the shoulder but only made a few yards sidling on the contour before falling dead into the scrub, which just goes to show that brute force is not a guaranteed bang-flop if you don’t put the bullet in the right place. Just listen to the report of this rifle. Also, I was pretty pleased with the quality of video from the Nikon on 32x zoom, first time I’ve used that camera.
The 28 Nosler is not a rifle for pussies and wimps. It’s a handful in raw form, but one that is tamed remarkably well by the muzzle brake and excellent carbon fibre custom stock made by one of our mates down here. So much so that despite it being a light rifle, I find it quite pleasant to shoot and not as annoying as some of the sharp recoiling non-magnum cartridges such as an ill-fitting .270 for example. The only problem is, you absolutely must remember to use your high quality earplugs. Failure to do so will result in permanent hearing loss. For this reason alone, I am dubious of its relevance in the arsenal, one mistake and you can regret it forever. It’s a stunning rifle, capable of insane accuracy at 1,000yd. Great fun, expensive to run, dangerous to your health. What’s not to like?
As we drove out of the block, a fallow presented itself at 200yd, and I was able to do my best cowboy impersonation, leaping from the still moving ATV whilst chambering a round and shouldering the .308 in one swift, nimble manoeuvre (ha ha) and letting off a shot that I felt was good.
The bloody deer took off up the slope into cover, damn, must have missed! Deer NEVER run uphill when hit, do they? That’s one of the deer stalking laws. Downhill – they’re dead. Uphill – they’re missed and gone. I had already thought up my first excuse, and was about to start making it, when all of a sudden the deer rolled out of the bush, down the hill to the track, very dead. I cannot remember having ever seen a well hit deer take off uphill like that. It was a close to perfect off-hand 200yd shoulder shot and another good animal for the freezer. And handily, right next to the track.
That evening, the fallow was dinner. Mmmm. The heart was carefully stowed in the drinks holder and served up later with perfectly fried onions, one of my favourite snacks. The main course was backstrap in chinese spices with bok choy.
In between times, there was some light relief in the form of rabbit shooting. This spring has also seen a marked increase in rabbit numbers, particularly around the yards, which is not good news for cattle or sheep due to the risk of leg breaks. So we climbed into them with the .22LRs, .223s and a very cool semi-custom CZ .22 TCM which is a fantastic wee varmint round.
The second rabbit from the left on the bonnet was 143m, CCI subs, not too shabby.
We get quite a few blackish rabbits and the odd pitch black one.
No point posting pictures of the .22 TCM’s rabbit. Way too violent with the 35gr V-Max. My .223 and the 50gr V-Max literally turns them inside out and sprays the innards far and wide. Effective, but messy.
I spent some time studying the wind one evening, using my anemometer and a red ribbon that I tied to a post about 100m away. I was stoked to drop two hares at 321m in two shots with the .223 and the 50gr V-Max, dialling for estimated windage.
I recently replaced the Vortex Viper PST 6-24x50 FFP with the Sightron S-Tac 4-20x50 SFP, as the Vortex was wasted on a varmint rifle. The Sightron has been excellent so far, with better glass than the Gen 1 Vortex and perfect tracking (which the Vortex also has).
Part 2 with Mate #2 to follow.
Culling to waste is a very difficult shift in mindset. Me and my two mates have always been uncomfortable with it, and we made a pact to recover as many deer as we could, or at least as much quality meat as we could recognising that whole animals are nigh on impossible to get out from much of the country, as it’s way too steep. It doesn’t really make sense though. A deer is just a grass stealing, manuka munching, pollen robbing ungulate pest just the same as a goat. Why we are so much more sensitive about them than goats is illogical really.
The initial reconnaissance showed the red deer were skittish and staying mostly up the back blocks on the higher country. The fallow were also nervous but staying low in their customary haunts. It was clear from the get go we’d be relying on mostly longer range shooting to get onto the reds, which isn’t a productive form of culling, for as soon as you’ve put the first shot into the mob, the rest scarper. But we were confident of being able to take out some closer range younger animals, as we were seeing last year’s yearlings wandering around looking a bit lost, having been recently ejected by their mothers ahead of this spring’s fawning.
I had the first evening to myself as Mate #1 wasn’t arriving until later the next day. I climbed up onto a ridgeline above the cattle flats, to scout for fallow. I wanted some camp meat and reckoned I’d be in with a better chance if I got some altitude and a wide field of view. Good decision – one directly below me at 305yd, another two away to the right at 425yd, lying down. I had the 18” .308 with the Z-600 Zeiss reticle on the 3-15x44, I love this BDC as it makes accurate holds really easy as soon as you know your range. I bowled the recoverable closer fallow and watched him tumble to an easy to reach position, before turning my attention to the other two to the right, who not surprisingly were now standing.
I really dithered over these two shots. I knew I wasn’t going to get to them that evening, with only half an hour of light left. But my mission objectives were clear: shoot deer, to waste if required. Fark it’s a hard thing to do, especially with fallow. But it is what it is, and they each bought a Speer 165gr BTSP, dropping them on the spot.
This Speer is a newish bullet to me, I bought some because I was disgusted with the Sierra price increases we’ve seen down here (since, coincidentally or not, the Tipped GameKing / GameChanger was introduced). These Speers are soft and quite brutal on small deer at close range, but in the 300-500yd class they are fantastic killers. Now they are proven to me, I’ve bought 1,000 of them and I’m sticking. The only other bullet I’ll use in the .308 is the much tougher 180gr RN ProHunter, for close range woods stalking.
I walked down the ridge to the ATV and drove around to collect my little fallow yearling.
Once Mate #1 had arrived, the selection of rifles was, er, abundant. There was a plan to do some video but I’m not really into that as it takes too much time away from the important business of attaching high velocity lead to animal. It’s really annoying when someone faffs around with cameras only for the deer to browse off the clearing and into cover! Having said that, in hindsight I wish we had done more, maybe next time. It would be good to actually show you fellas more of what we do in “real time” so to speak. We did however get a couple of half decent efforts done and my new camera worked better than I expected.
The second day started well, with Mate #1 flattening a hind at 460yd with his 7mm SAUM. The deer were standing right at the bottom of a long face down to one of the lethal gorges we have here, and not for the first time they ran towards the shooting position, a strange phenomenon that I think it a function of reflected sound from the faces behind them. Mate #1 is shooting the 162gr 7mm A-Max and man how it poleaxes deer when put into the shoulder. Unfortunately, no sooner had he decked it, he realised he had a problem with the next round from the new batch of reloads – they were jamming in the lands. Initial assessment suggested a problem he’d had before – a subtlety different shape to the ogive. I haven’t got any more info on this yet, will be interesting to see if he can prove it.
(One thing that was a recurring theme on this trip was the confusion caused by a mix of MRAD and MOA scopes set up to use metres and yards, and only one rangefinder that will work reliably on wet and misty days. Take it from me, it’s not a good idea. Big ups for the Vortex that worked, and no ups at all for the Leica that quite often wouldn’t.)
So from that point on it was either watch me, or use my 6.5 Creedmoor with the 143gr ELD-X. This was a bit like asking a coal miner to drink a glass of rosé at the end of his shift. I switched to the .308 and we wandered up a ridgeline into the breeze, before long we spied another two hinds browsing off a small clearing on a spur running away from us. We each lined up on an animal and rehearsed the old favourite “1, 2, 3, pop” with a couple of dry fires, then did it for real in almost perfect unison. The deer were at exactly 400yd and both crashed to the ground in a heap.
Mate #1 instantly fell in love with his hipster bearded, strawberry craft beer loving, soy latté sipping Creedmoor and tried to keep it. After some entertaining discussion about Creedmoors and crusty old men and their Mauser 98s, I further demonstrated the Howa’s accuracy by bowling over a hare at 458m.
6.5 Creedmoor. The cartridge of choice for the modern man with the tactical beard....
After a challenging walk dodging some ferocious showers, there was a flurry of activity the moment the sun came out. The deer appeared from the sheltering scrub just as magically as Mr Benn’s shopkeeper, though they were on the other side of the valley. The wind was favourable, from behind but sufficiently across not to wind us. Light rain returned but the deer stayed out, so back to business. Two shots were taken with the Creedmoor, the first at 523m.
The second at 497m sent a good stag rolling down the hill with a fountain of claret spewing from his offside. This second Creedmoor shot was filmed, it’s a bit grainy but you can see what happens. In the interest of reflecting on what can (and will) happen from time-to-time with this kind of shooting, you can see the animal take a step just as I pull the trigger. The learning here was that I was waiting too long with my left eye closed and the right eye in the ocular lens, and the sight eye was getting tired. No excuses, I put the shot too far back, an estimated 3-4” further back than the high shoulder I had planned. Hence the rear legs were paralysed but not the front legs. However, this example of a poor shot demonstrates the critical important of using a quality bullet with a good balance of penetration and frangibility. Note the dramatic exit wound and profuse bleeding – a fountain of blood. Coupled with partial paralysis, the deer died very quickly where he lay, just out of shot, in a matter of seconds. We scooted up the track a bit further to see him lying there, weirdly right next to another dead deer, one that had obviously been there a long time.
If I had used a hard, non-fragmenting bullet at this range, I doubt we would have seen the utter destruction of the rear lungs (and possibly the liver).
The first Creedmoor shot on the hind was one we wanted to recover, but couldn’t get to due to very poor and dangerous track conditions. We managed to get up there a few days later, by which time the animal was about to explode. Annoying, but that’s just the way it goes. But the photo shows the conditions and country reasonably well. Red SP for “shooting position”.
Something semi-technical to reflect upon. When you’re hunting steep country like this, it’s relatively easy to get an accurate range on an animal as long as there’s little moisture in the air. Contrast this to trying to range an animal in flat country; it’s all too easy to pick up a range on an object that is well before, or well behind, the animal that you want to shoot in flat country. Then, consider the trajectory of the bullet – at 500m+ my 6.5mm ELD-X is travelling at 2060fps but at quite a steep downward angle as it slows and falls. You can see this angle with the strike of the bullet on that stag, very close to or in the spine, but exiting just below the midline of the torso. This angle of impact generally does a lot of damage, often more than a flat shot that's a bit too far back – it’s much more forgiving. As a general rule, on days when wind isn’t a deterrent, we’re 100% comfortable with these kind of shots in steep country. Just remember to keep both eyes open until just before you finalise your shot.
We stayed up on the hill waiting for deer o’clock, walking over into an adjoining watershed that I was pretty confident we’d not spooked up too much. We switched to walk and stalk mode with the .308, and right on cue we walked into two plump yearlings and a scraggly looking spiker. Mate #1 was rifleman for the evening, and as I called ranges he whacked the deer, three shots in quick succession bang bang bang, at 315yd, and two at 200yd.
We decided against taking the farthest red spiker as it hadn’t fared particularly well over winter. The two smaller yearlings were also pretty ordinary but worth recovering, and were promptly cut up and packed out back to the ATV. All up, a productive day in which lots of lessons were learned about the conditions and the location of the deer.
Next day was a washout, hopeless weather. We managed one deer at 300yd in the morning which is in my notes but I can’t even remember it, as I was entirely focussed on not having to get out of the ATV. That evening the weather cleared enough to encourage us to get out and look for goats down by the yards, which we duly found, and knocked over with the .223s, eight in all. I use a 50gr at 3,400fps in my 1:12” twist, Mate #1 uses a 75gr ELD-M in his 1:8” twist. Here’s two typical smelly grass thieves. They weigh around 45kg, certainly not as big as some I’ve shot, fairly average really. That’s almost twice the weight of a typical roe buck. Our large, mature goats are roughly the weight of a fallow doe.
I really like the 1:8” .223s. There is a very strong argument in my mind to drop the .243 Win altogether for this kind of shooting, the muzzle blast from the ~25gr of powder in the .223 is nothing compared to the ~46gr in the .243. Considering they are both throwing the same weight projectile, that’s a helluva difference, and no animal alive in this country is going to know the difference between the two cartridges’ respective velocity (3,400fps for my 6mm 75gr V-Max, 3,000fps for the 5.56mm 75gr ELD-M). Sitting next to a .223 shooter and spotting is a much less hazardous occupation hearing-wise than with the .243, that’s just a reality. The .223 is such an efficient little cartridge.
The next day was the last chance to get out the 28 Nosler and 195gr Berger VLD Hunting and go for some proper long-range deer. We were pretty sure by now where they were and how we would reach them, but alas the wet and misty conditions meant the expensive Leica rangefinder wouldn’t perform at all, whereas the Vortex worked 50-60% of the time. The mob we wanted to target was at around 875yd – no chance of that in the conditions - but a hind and her yearling popped up in the closer gully at 660yd. That deer was also hit slightly behind the shoulder but only made a few yards sidling on the contour before falling dead into the scrub, which just goes to show that brute force is not a guaranteed bang-flop if you don’t put the bullet in the right place. Just listen to the report of this rifle. Also, I was pretty pleased with the quality of video from the Nikon on 32x zoom, first time I’ve used that camera.
The 28 Nosler is not a rifle for pussies and wimps. It’s a handful in raw form, but one that is tamed remarkably well by the muzzle brake and excellent carbon fibre custom stock made by one of our mates down here. So much so that despite it being a light rifle, I find it quite pleasant to shoot and not as annoying as some of the sharp recoiling non-magnum cartridges such as an ill-fitting .270 for example. The only problem is, you absolutely must remember to use your high quality earplugs. Failure to do so will result in permanent hearing loss. For this reason alone, I am dubious of its relevance in the arsenal, one mistake and you can regret it forever. It’s a stunning rifle, capable of insane accuracy at 1,000yd. Great fun, expensive to run, dangerous to your health. What’s not to like?
As we drove out of the block, a fallow presented itself at 200yd, and I was able to do my best cowboy impersonation, leaping from the still moving ATV whilst chambering a round and shouldering the .308 in one swift, nimble manoeuvre (ha ha) and letting off a shot that I felt was good.
The bloody deer took off up the slope into cover, damn, must have missed! Deer NEVER run uphill when hit, do they? That’s one of the deer stalking laws. Downhill – they’re dead. Uphill – they’re missed and gone. I had already thought up my first excuse, and was about to start making it, when all of a sudden the deer rolled out of the bush, down the hill to the track, very dead. I cannot remember having ever seen a well hit deer take off uphill like that. It was a close to perfect off-hand 200yd shoulder shot and another good animal for the freezer. And handily, right next to the track.
That evening, the fallow was dinner. Mmmm. The heart was carefully stowed in the drinks holder and served up later with perfectly fried onions, one of my favourite snacks. The main course was backstrap in chinese spices with bok choy.
In between times, there was some light relief in the form of rabbit shooting. This spring has also seen a marked increase in rabbit numbers, particularly around the yards, which is not good news for cattle or sheep due to the risk of leg breaks. So we climbed into them with the .22LRs, .223s and a very cool semi-custom CZ .22 TCM which is a fantastic wee varmint round.
The second rabbit from the left on the bonnet was 143m, CCI subs, not too shabby.
We get quite a few blackish rabbits and the odd pitch black one.
No point posting pictures of the .22 TCM’s rabbit. Way too violent with the 35gr V-Max. My .223 and the 50gr V-Max literally turns them inside out and sprays the innards far and wide. Effective, but messy.
I spent some time studying the wind one evening, using my anemometer and a red ribbon that I tied to a post about 100m away. I was stoked to drop two hares at 321m in two shots with the .223 and the 50gr V-Max, dialling for estimated windage.
I recently replaced the Vortex Viper PST 6-24x50 FFP with the Sightron S-Tac 4-20x50 SFP, as the Vortex was wasted on a varmint rifle. The Sightron has been excellent so far, with better glass than the Gen 1 Vortex and perfect tracking (which the Vortex also has).
Part 2 with Mate #2 to follow.
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