Thanks for all the information this site has provided me ! From what I read it is a very friendly competitive sport. I kind of lump it together with golf and fishing, both of which are relaxing and are both at the same spectrum for expense and time required to become the best as possible. This sport however, has a handicap for the quality of the equipment required to achieve desirable personal satisfactory results ! It appears that I will probably be spending a little (lots) of money in the the future as I venture into LRH. Only question is how much will it take and how long will it take to understand the rules, jargon and synonyms to be effective and consistent in the future. Who knows where the rabbit hole ends !
Slight correction, there really is no competitive aspect to Long Range Hunting.
Whatever competition there is, is in measuring our performance against our own performance striving to produce ever more accurate and precise shots as we extend our range; if that makes any sense to you at all.
Never be embarrassed to ask a question, odds are you aren't the first to ask it and if you are then everyone can lean from the answers.
What do you need? A rifle and load capable of sub MOA accuracy and the skills to shoot to that level or better. You can buy the first pretty easily these days but the skill level takes practice under all sorts of varying conditions and making good notes of your results along then with the ability to condense things down and learn from them.
When I was young I was with a family friend driving across a ranch near Newcastle Texas when we spotted a coyote hightailing it out of a wheat field and up a hill.
My friend slowly and deliberately shuts down the truck, grabs a rifle and sets up on the hood getting on the coyote.
Finally he pulls the trigger on the still running coyote and drops him.
I asked, "How did you ever learn to make such a shot, he had to be 800yds out and on the move".
He looks back at me and says, "by missing a lot".
You're going to miss a lot more than you hit as you are learning the game but if you learn from those misses they are just a small investment along the way.
You're also going to learn that reading the wind is the hardest thing of all.
There are some good long range shooting courses available today that we didn't have when I was young and those can be a huge jump start towards becoming a competent long range shooter/hunter so if you have the budget be sure and work some of them in sooner rather than later.