Hunting Load

This weekend, the weekend before hunting season, lots of folks are sighting in their hunting rifles.  I did that earlier this month, and I settled on my cold-barrel shot.

If you're hunting, the rifle is cold for the first shot.  It's important that the hunter knows where that first shot is going and there is no way to know that than to fire that shot from a cold barrel.  I started in June, getting ready for a cold-barrel shot and over the months when I'd go to the range I'd take my rifle and see where the cold barrel shot was going.  I can't control all the variables, and I know that the weather in July is hotter than the weather in December, but I could control some of the variables and I was careful to keep the barrel of the rifle at room temperature.  I cleaned the rifle in June and the barrel won't be cleaned again till after the hunting season.  Since the cleaning in June, it's had 16 shots fired through it, all cold barrel shots.  The last shot fired is shown in the target below.

That'll do for my purposes, and the load did that three or four times in the weeks before I took that shot.  The load consists of RP brass, Winchester primers, 61.0 grains of Reloder 19, and a Nosler 150 grain ballistic tip bullet.  I don't know how fast that bullet is traveling because I haven't put it over a chronograph.  The Nosler manual tells me that it should be traveling somewhere around 2900 fps, which is sufficient for my purposes.

If I miss my target, it's no one's fault but my own.