As usual around here, the calm weather was good for a single night. Today was colder and very windy, gusty and quite variable at almost a perfect 90 degrees across my range. Typically I would not have even bothered trying to shoot today, but I may not get another chance for a couple weeks so I pulled out the wind meter and decided to give it a shot.

After posting at 300 yds I fired the first shot (.458 325gr FTX 130gr 777), realized I'd forgotten to dial in wind and dialed in a correction before firing a group. By now my hands were quite cold, I was ready to pull my target and be done. I went to check it; one hole to the right where I'd expect the first shot to go, but no others! WTH?!?!? OOPS...should have got more sleep, it dawned on me I dialed the WRONG WAY!!!

Well, I fixed that and fired three more shots. I tried to pick times the wind was roughly the same but I had no flags, it was changing rapidly, and the wind where my bench is is way less than 100 yds and further down the range (more open). This was a worst case scenario setup -- I'd never consider shooting at a deer with that kind of crosswind.

I then loaded up my standard load, 200gr SW and 110gr 777:

First, the 100 yd target from last night:

First shot was on a squeaky clean barrel and not expected to print with the next two, so with the second two within 3/4" I'll take it as a great group.

Now the 300 yd target from today:


The shot near center was from last night. You can see the group strung out about 6" from left to right, but only about 3/4" vertical variation. I wanted the 200gr SW on there to demonstrate how it drifted a lot further, but it wasn't a fair test; when I shot it I got a lull in the wind and it experienced less wind than any of the other three shots yet drifted the furthest. For reference, I had 4.5 MOA (about 14 inches) of wind drift dialed into the scope.

Normally, I would hardly admit to a 6" group at 300 yds but given the crappy conditions and the fact that it was virtually all horizontal wind spread, I am VERY happy with the result!! This is honestly the worst conditions I've ever tried to shoot 300 yds.

VERDICT: My old load was 200gr SW and 110gr 777, which chrono'd 2040 today. This 325gr FTX 130gr 777 load chrono'd 1900 fps, +/- 20fps across all shots fired today. The result is that, at 300 yds, I have virtually the exact same trajectory as my old load, with less wind drift, and deliver almost twice as much energy. I have a new hunting load, we'll see how these bullets do on deer next fall.

I'm going to punch some ballistics calculations now.

edited to add: Typically I get 15 MOA drop at this range, for some reason today I got an extra 1.25 MOA drop (notice the difference between the center impact from last night and where they were printing today).