Over the years there have been quite a few threads asking "how long do you leave your gun loaded?".

My response has always been something like "I load on a clean dry barrel and leave it loaded until I take a shot at game, or until the end of the season, whichever comes first. Sometimes it's loaded for several months and I've never had a failure. Been doing it for years and years."

Well guys, I had my first failure Sunday morning. Not a failure to fire, but a significant weakening of the charge.

Here's how it went. On November 12th. I loaded my Omega X7 with 95 grains of GOEX FFFg and a 250 grain Gold Dot in a Harvester short black sabot. I passed a shot on a medium size 80/85 lb. doe the first day of the season (figuring I could do better the next day or next week) and on a young 5 point buck (because I usually don't shoot bucks that look to be a year and a half old). Those were the only "club legal" deer I've seen so far this year. The only other deer I've seen were either bucks of less than five points (not club legal) or six month old does and button bucks.

Well, it turns out our club is having the worst season we've had in our 15 years of existence. Very very few deer sightings and only six deer killed so far when we would usually have taken at least three times that number and passed up many more. Now with two months of our three month season already gone and no meat in the freezer, I'm getting to the desperation point.

So at 8:10 a.m. Sunday morning I'm staring at a food plot lush with oats, wheat and clover pondering why I haven't seen a deer on that plot for three weekends running, when a really nice doe steps out of the tree line at the rear of the plot - 97 yards out. Under the circumstances I was calm and cool. She was broadside, standing still and munching grass when I placed the cross hairs of the 4X ProDiamond for a perfect double lung shot, and confidently squeezed the trigger. I knew exactly where those cross hairs were when the gun went off. Perfect shot!

Now we all know it seems you hardly hear the shot or feel the recoil when shooting at game. Nothing unusual about that. But that shot sounded and felt "funny" to me. As the white smoke began to diminish I could see that doe standing exactly where she was when I shot, except facing me instead of broadside. She was bobbing her head up and down and side to side, trying to figure out what that drifting white cloud was. After about fifteen seconds of that (a long, long time under the circumstances) she calmly turned around and stepped back into the woods.

Well, I reloaded and sat there for another three hours staring that that empty plot and replaying the shot in my head. I know I made a good shot - good sight picture, good trigger pull, no jitters, etc.

We've had lots of weather changes over the last two months, with fronts moving through to the Gulf of Mexico and then backing up. Warm S.E. wind when you go to bed and cold fog when you wake up. I did notice a little sweat on the barrel a time or two when I took the gun our to the box in the truck for a morning hunt. I can only conclude that the load got damp enough to greatly reduce velocity and that Gold Dot went into the clover somewhere between me and that doe.

When I got back to camp the landowner to the South of us was sitting on the deck of my little hooch. "Was that you who shot", he asked. "Yeah", I said, "I missed a nice doe." "I was hunting my stand just across the fence from your stand" he said. "But I wasn't sure it was you because it sounded kinda` funny."

Scope Check (naturally ): I walked out to the range, put a target on the 100 yard board and fired my reload. It hit 3/4" from the dead center of the bull.

So guys, the next time one of those "how long" posts shows up listen to Cayugad who always says he clears his load at the end of the day and always hunts with a fresh load. I may not go quite that far and will probably leave a load in for two or three days depending on the weather. But I guarantee I'll have a fresh load every weekend.