Well, I'm shooting 2 50 grain Pyrodex pellets as I said earlier with a 295 grain Powerbelt hollow point bullet. For primers I'm using the Federal Fusion primers. The first deer I shot was a small doe about 80-100 yards. I didn't measure out exactly but it was somewhere around there. Shot right behind the front shoulders. The bullet was a pass through. Had a fairly small hole going in and coming out. The doe ran about 15 yards or so and flopped over. I never saw her move again.
The second one I shot was a spike. I shot him at around 100 yards and also shot right behind the front shoulder. When I shot he fell over flopping around. He then got up after a few seconds and took off running towards the woods. I never saw him again. We tracked him for quite a while. We found blood on a couple tree's he rubbed against but that was it. The guy helping me track it said it looked like I might have hit it high which I may have as I wasn't on a steady rest just a rail of the stand and I'm not the best at keeping it still without sand bags. We never did find him. Only found blood on two tree's and once we got to the thick stuff we couldn't find any blood or any deer. We looked in it for a while and finally had to give up as we couldn't find any signs of him.
The next one I shot was a 6 pointer. He was around 20 yards from me. I aimed right at the bottom of him since I was sighted in for 100 yards. I hit him right in the heart area. It left a huge hole going in. I've never seen it do this. It's like it hit hard and expanded going in. It never made it out the other side but made a huge hole that left a nice blood trail. The deer ran maybe 150 yards or so. Maybe 100 hard to tell since I didn't go directly to him I followed the blood trail. However, there was blood every few feet and I found the deer laying dead at the end of the blood trail.
The only other one I've shot was with this same bullet combo but wasn't in the Remington Genesis. It was in a Marlin and was last year. Same bullet and pellet combo but with a Winchester #11 cap. I shot it around 136 yards. It was a decent sized 8 point buck. It was a shot in the lung area. The bullet didn't leave a huge hole going in like it did this year on the 6 pointer. However, it left a decent hole and the bullet was pushing the skin out on the other side but didn't make it out. The deer ran about 20-30 yards and fell. He couldn't get back up although he looked like he was trying. I didn't want to see him suffer so I reloaded and shot him again from around 20 yards away. This one pretty much exploded inside of him and did huge damage. I shot him in the back this time as it's the only thing I could get a shot at. I recovered both bullets from this one.
These are the recovered bullets
They seem to do their job and are pretty accurate. That's why I've stuck with them. However, I've also thought about switching and trying something else. The biggest thing that worries me about these is it seems like I don't usually get a pass through unless it's something small like the doe where it just goes straight through. On both bucks I've shot and found it wasn't a pass through. The bullet stopped pushing the skin out on the other side. Should I worry about this or should I stick with this combo as long as it keeps dropping deer?
2 Genesis 4 deer
