Opening day of muzzleloader season here in NC, Eastern zone.
One week prior I headed over to my brothers place where we scouted an area and decided to hunt.
It was public gamelands and no one ever seems to hunt there.
Next week, I am there, my brother can't make it for the AM hunt.
I park the truck walk across the 150 yd field to the edge of the woods where I set up my tree climber.
I climb to about 10ft off the ground and wait for the sun to rise. It's a really foggy morning, cool of 60° or so with expected high of about 80°.
Mosquitos are bad but the Off is working fine and there were about 12 bats helping out with the mosquitos and bugs. About 8am I hear some splashing in the flood waters behind me, normally they would be dry but we had some heavy rains earlier in the week and the lake is up and making a mini marsh behind me.
After looking behind me for about 10 min I turn to face forward across the field and I see a big horned BUCK!
He's 50 yds away and walking straight towards me. I slowly raise the gun, he stops, I stop, then he starts walking again I raise up and shoot. At this point he's about 40 yds away.
He's slightly quartering towards me, I shoot point on his shoulder little low, wanting to brake bone and take out both lungs.
I just bought a new CVA Wolf stainless inline, put a nice Burris on it and zeroed it. It is a really nice rifle. Easy to shoot, good accuracy and best of all easy to clean.
After the shot he takes off running directly away from me, zig zags a tad take a stumble, goes a bit farther and then is suddenly 'gone'. I head a final crash, and his dissappearance was unusual as you can still see a long ways. If he were up and mobile I could still see him.
I tie an orange tape to the tree where I am, climb down and proceed to look for him. I misjudged where he landed but when I found him in the ditch I was really happy. Two reasons, opening day big buck and he's 30 feet from the truck!
I'm using a 44 cal sabot in my 50 cal inline. It's a lead SWC HP I cast myself, yep sized and lubed and in the sabot. They shoot well so I used them. The entrance hole on the buck was a perfect circle, cookie cutter hole. Bullet was found in off side between rib and hyde.
Didn't have my camera with me but here is a picture of the horns. Technically it's a 13 pt. I call it a 9pt.
He weighed in at about 175ish pounds.
picture here
Here is a picture of the bullet.
My bullet I used is the round HP one on the right side, 247gr, my brother used the other one.
The card tells the 'beginning' bullet wt and the end bullet wt below it.
The second deer my brother got in the evening hunt. A nice little doe. He has the same type of muzzleloader I do. CVA wolf. We both shoot 80 gr of FFG.
He was about 25 ft up the tree and this doe was below him about 40 yds away. He took a downward angle shot into the shoulder and center punched the heart. That bullet had a LOT of bone to traverse. The remains were stuck between the ribcage and the hyde. He said she never moved out of her tracks, just fell over and twitched once and expired.
I also cast that bullet, it's a Star HP, ACWW.
Don't know the velocity but I'd say it did a bang up job. I may switch him to a heavier bullet that's not so fragile.
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