Well, after a long drought this year, I finally managed to connect last Friday.
Went out early in the am, spooking deer right and left because the moon was so bright and it was really still and quiet. I was sitting on the ground against a large berm with a lot of open grassy land to my right and left, and some shrubs in front of me. Just after it got light, a buck starts making his way towards me. I get ready, look through my scope, and it's all blurry! To make a long story short, the buck presented a nice broadside shot, but I couldn't shoot because I couldn't see through the scope. After the buck walks away into the brush, I check my scope and find out that the eyepiece lens had somehow come unscrewed so far that it was making everything blurry. Never happened to me before.
About 20 minutes later, a doe comes from the same direction. Gives me a quartering-to shot, I brace with my shooting sling, aim, squeeze the trigger........ and pop!(not BOOM). The first misfire I've ever had. It seemed like a bad primer, because everything else was okay. Anyways, I put a new primer in, and the doe is still there. It had gone into some brambles, and all I could see was the neck and head, so I aimed at the middle of the neck and fired.
Reloaded, walked up and she was lying there still moving, so I put a second shot through the vitals just to be sure (I've been jinxed so many times this year that I wasn't taking any chances). Turns out I made a good shot on the neck, and the second shot wasn't necessary. It was a nice 1.5 or 2.5 year old doe - probably 120 - 130 pounds live weight. I've already processed the meat, and it's good eating!
Unfortuantely, I didn't get a picture of the deer, but I did get a picture of the recovered bullet, which I know some of you are interested in. Both neck and coup de grace shots were with this load:
.45 cal in-line CVA
200 grain XTP
80 grains loose 777
MMP sabot
Federal primer
The neck shot was a complete pass-through of course (range was 102 paces- about 100 yards). The finishing shot was from a range of about 5 yards and angled through the chest cavity. The bullet did pass completely through the deer, exiting the rib cage, but did not exit the hide - I found it lodged under the hide on the far side. Exit hole through the rib cage was huge - larger than a golf ball.
Unfortunately, as you can see, the core did separate from the jacket, but to give credit to the folks at Hornady, it DID fully penetrate the deer and the core was still sitting inside the copper jacket when I found it - it was just loose and fell out when I grabbed it. Sorry for the long post - I just know some of you have questions, and I wanted to answer them all right away. Thanks to you all for all the good advice I've gotten from this forum!
Finally connected with the ML
