I managed to get a nice doe in PA on Monday with my inline. The load was recently worked up with the Lee 300-rf in a sabot with no gas check and 80 gr of triple seven about 8 BHN.
For years I was shooting plain base bullets in sabots with mediocre accuracy and I was happy to find some accuracy again! My 20 year old CVA wolf rattles like a spray paint can and I just assumed I was hard on it as a teenager with lots of magnum loads and more than one ram rod launched down range. These GC design bullets in a sabot shot 5 into 1.5" at 50 with open sights and the newer scoped wolf shoots them great also.
For whatever reason when I cast this batch of bullets I decided to make them on the softer side. I killed a few with my 45 colt rifle at the same speed last year with harder bullets and had plenty of wound channel. I like to eat 'em, not blow 'em up.
I hit this 140 pound live weight doe at about 15 yards and at the 13 yard mark there was a chunk of lung the size of a chew can. It blew a big chunk of lung far out of the entry side. She ended up going pretty far considering how hard she was hit. The bullet exited. Once I got her skinned the entrance hole was a clean 3 inch circle and the exit was over an inch.
All in all, I ended up with a nice large doe and a string of 70 degree days so I hurried to get her skint and quartered and on ice. Ended up with 45 pounds of deboned meat and could have had some more if the ribs weren't so blood shot. And everyone says those PA deer are tiny compared to our big Midwest deer. Well that one was like a mile from Ohio so I wanna claim she did most of her eating over the line.
Gonna melt the rest of those bullets down and give them a little antimony like I used last year in the 45 colt rifle at the same muzzle velocity.
I have some pics if the website will allow me to upload them. Have any of you guys ever hunted PA as a non-resident? Holy cow they have so many rules and exceptions to rules and weird morals codified into law. Their hunting reg book is 3/8" thick and the size of a textbook. This is my second year over there and only felt comfortable enough to deer hunt over there this year after a whole year of re-reading the book.