I'm not this type of hunter, but I've witnessed many of the guys I hunt with act in a similar manner. I personally clean my rifle at the end of the day. It doesn't matter if I fired it 3x, or not.

When it comes to the rest of the guys I hunt with it seems we have two groups. A handful of them clean it after shooting it occasionally, but most of the time they just load it again and hunt with it the next few days. Sometimes they clean them on the weekends after hunting all week, but more often than not they wait until the end of the 2 week hunting season and then clean them. I don't know anyone that shoots BH209, so usually by this time the barrels are pretty rusted and are pitted by the time they do clean them. However, they shoot well enough for them and they don't seem to have any problems other than having a muzzle loader in worse shape than I'd like it to be if it was mine.

The other group shoot's theirs and doesn't or very rarely cleans them. These things literally look like the bore has been in the ocean for years. It's rust caked up inside of it. I tried to tell one friend he needs to start cleaning these things, and he proceeded to tell me that there was no point in cleaning them because he'd never seen a muzzle loader with no rust. I then had to mention to him that mine had no rust, and it was because I cleaned it. It saddens me because he owns several and several of them are pretty nice, and they are just basically ruined. His solution is "shoot" the rust out each year. Last year he was complaining because his wouldn't shoot well at all and they had trouble getting it sighted in. Hmm, I wonder why. There are about 5 or 6 guys I hunt with that have this same attitude, and their guns all look horrible and most of them shoot horrible.

This is just my experience with the majority of hunters in this area. I don't know how other hunters are.