ORIGINAL: ShatoDavis
Well, the good news is that you recovered the animals so the rifles done their jobs.
My experience with the 243 is that you generally have a sparse blood trail to follow, but luckily you don't have to follow itvery far.
Also, keep in mind that the higher in the chest cavity the shot is placed the lighter the blood trail. think of a styrofoam cup: You poke a hole towards the bottom fluid leaks quickly, poke hole towards the top and the cup has to fill up most of the way until it starts to leak. So if you poke a hole in a deer high in the chest, the chest cavity must fill most of the way before it start pouring out the hole.
Shoulder shots generally provide a sparse blood trail in my experience, but are usually short track jobs.... Heart shots usually leave aheavy blood trail, buta deer can travel several hundred yards gushing blood from a heart shot. Lung shots usually provide decent blood and relatively short trails.I really don't think you have a problem with bullet type.
I think you said it best, and this has been my expierence also.
We go through this every year bowhunting, those arrows can leave some nasty blood trails, other times we dont get much blood, same bow, same shooter, same broadhead, we just scratchour heads.
could a deer be dead at moment of impact and the heart is just not pumping blood, leaving no blood trail. I have used the core locks in .243 as well, I remeber this one time I took a descent axis buck with the rem core locks and it left one hell of a blood trail. Are you sure your looking very good for blood. I remeber this one time my kid shot a 6 pointer with the .243, we went to the place we remebered the buck stood but couldnt find a thing, he was standing on a sendero, we looked and looked and looked, we thought we lost him and then my son finally found blood a couple of steps in the woods, and it was heavy, followed it into the wood about 50ft and there he was, I even walked that trail twice looking for the deer and missed him piled up in the under brush. The very next day we were walking down that same sendero and walked right up to a blood patch where the deer was standing the day before, but we never saw it when we were looking for it, go figure. Blood sometimes can be hard to spot, but once it is it usually leads straight to the animal.