156 still doing work!!
My co-worker at the Sheriff's Office had only ever shot 1 deer while road hunting, and really wanted to go on a good deer hunt. I know her well, she has more work ethic and more try than 10 average people combined, so I figured she earned it.
I took her up to one of my secret spots, and we picked this guy out of several other good bucks. He may not have scored quite as good as a couple other we looked at, but he was an OLD brute, and had the biggest body of any deer I have ever seen.
Due to the contour of this basin, we were as close as we could get, 940 yards. Any further forward was a cliff drop off, around and lower and we couldn't see him. I am the firearms instructor for the county, and I know that she follows instruction to a T and does it right, I was confident that she could do it. I had her take a bunch of dry fires waiting for the buck to step out of the timber, and when he did this went down.
The first shot, she was so focused on making a good trigger squeeze she didn't notice that he stepped about 10" forward, and hit the liver. She reloaded, got back on target, and her second shot was on point with a narrow target zone. Her excitement was pretty awesome. I recovered both bullets under the hide on the off side, though I lost them in the snow because it was blizzarding when I was cutting the deer up. I would guess they were around 80-100 grains, and mushroomed beautifully. Normally I may be concerned, but this was a huge deer, and a long ways away. Of ONLY meat and no bone, I packed out over 100 lbs, and we didn't take the lower leg shank meat, cut off probably 10+ lbs of fat, and a little meat loss from the shot. Here is meat damage on exit side of second shot.
Not bad, total we lost around 5-6 lbs of meat, so I was happy with them for sure. Impact velocity was 2075 fps, with 1492 ft-lbs of retained energy. I may do another thread in the mule deer hunting section detailing the hunt more, it was a lot of fun and an adventure. Look for it there in the next day or two if interested.
I love this bullet guys!! Excited to try it on elk.