Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Shot of a lifetime - 7mm Magnum Bullet

John, thanks and agreed on the NBT. I really like Partitions, but my first love with Nosler has always been the Ballisitc Tip. I used them for a decade before I ever shot a Partition, and they've only gotten better!

One shot did the bull in. He ran 50 yards and was stone dead when I got to him within a minute of shooting him.

This won't give those joy that like text-book mushrooms, but is perfectly good performance, and exactly what I expected:

Brad, some might consider the jacket core separation a failure, but it worked and you have elk in the freezer. I've seen the same thing with my favorite 250gr sierra gameking launched from my 338's. It puts elk down right now, the core exits and the jackets are found in the offside hide. If I were the OP, I'd let my rifle decide which hunting bullet it likes and practice shots out to (and past) expected/forseen distances. Also practice quick follow up shots. Heaven forbid, you need another shot. Just good practice to rack another one in and be ready. To me, "shot of a lifetime" means you better damn well be prepared to make that shot.

If it meant I would draw a tag, I'd take this:



Shooting these:



Just gimme a damn tag

Should make a darn good all around bullet in that 7-08. Nice bull.

For some people in the ever increasing field of LR "hunting", higher BC's, wind meters, G7 rangefinders, schitthangingoffthereticles, and 3lb riflescopes makes the johnson grow larger as well.

Makes me wonder how we get coyotes killed with bullets that have B.C's under .300 at ranges of around 400-450 yards and scopes set around 6x.

I've shot more game with Ballistic Tips than anything else. But, I have seen a couple of times when they made me second guess my choice. One of them the 150 7mm (new generation) on a little whitetail. The results were dramatic but I don't think any part of that bullet made it more than 8" into that deer.

I'm talking myself into Partitions more and more all the time. :-)

A few instances come to mind, but before I go into detail it's important to point out that any shot taken on game should come only after we've practiced so exhaustively that we will make our shot 9-10 times out of 10, regardless of the cartridge/bullet combo we're using. Having said that, high-BC/velocity combos take less work, practice, and skill to use effectively with, say, a 90% confidence interval. With a bullet that is blown off of the vital zone by a 3 mph wind change, let's just say it takes 2000 rounds of practice shooting in variable winds to be able to call the correction with 90% certainty to within 3 mph. With a higher BC bullet and more speed, maybe it takes a 6 mph wind change to have the same effect. So maybe you can learn to call wind within 6 mph with only 600 rounds of practice at the distance in question.

Having said that, I shot a sheep in the mountains where wind is very difficult to detect as it blows between outcroppings. The shot was at 415 yards and I was using a .25-06 at 100gr MK. I was able to successfully call the wind well enough that 2 shots hit right behind the shoulder. I also shot a coyote at 942 yards using the same bullet, and both of those shots were the result of sending lots and lots of 100 MK downrange, and relatively little wind. If there had been much wind for either of those shots, I would have wished I had a more aerodynamic bullet.

Recently a friend and I were hunting elk in terrain that is also difficult to judge wind in, due to minimal vegetation, and topographical features are the primary source of wind indication. A couple of shots were made with a 7WSM and 162AM that could have turned out badly if I were using something less wind-impervious. The first was at 532 meters and was taken on a cow that was quartering away steeply. The bullet went were I wanted it to go. A minute later my friend fired a 208 AM at another cow in the herd, and a gust of wind came up right at the shot. The bullet entered the liver. As we approached the elk to finish it, she detected us from over 750 meters, then got up and started to run away. A 162 AM hit her in the rear quarters, exiting behind the offside shoulder. There was a significant amount of wind and combined with the lead required to hit her on the run, I was glad to be using the 162 instead of a bullet that may have been blown 6" off course by the wind. Likewise, if a gust of wind had kicked up during the shot on the first cow, the bullet may still have stayed on course, when a lesser bullet may have resulted in a wounding shot.

There have been several others using other chamberings and bullets, and in each case I had to consider the distance of the shot, the shot presentation of the animal, the wind behaviour, as well as the bullet I was shooting and the amount of practice I had done previously with that bullet. If the wind was too much for a given bullet, I had to call it a no shot as where I may have taken the shot with a more resilient bullet. The only way to see how badly a bullet is affected by the wind is to do a lot of shooting at targets in various winds. I can tell you that I would be confident shooting in worse winds using that 7WSM/162AM combo than I would a .308/150SP combo.

I'm not advocating that BC is THE only factor to consider in bullet selection, as I am also a big TTSX user, but when we're talking about shots in the wind beyond 400 yards, BC starts to give a marked advantage. That is easy to see if you take a few chamberings/bullets out on a windy day and compare them on steel side-by-side.

More pictures please.

This is a pretty good thread, fairly informative, and more pics would be great....grin

Jordan Smith....what do you consider "windy'?

Sam;
Good evening to you sir, hopefully this finds you folks all well and as ready for Christmas as you'd hoped to be.

So with the understanding that most of my interaction with sheep is the local California Bighorn variety, I'd say this about that.....

If one is hunting say mid October or later, then it's a completely different animal once the rut kicks in. They'll stand for photos like this all day long.

Ancient scan from the olden times - maybe '85

Sometimes though earlier in the year one can bump them on some bedding rocks and they'll sit long enough for a photo. One can readily see they know EXACTLY where I was taking said photo from though.


Again later in fall, they'll become silly enough that the local mulies will stop to watch them strut their stuff.


Back when we had a general open season however, if one wanted to tag a legal 3/4 curl ram, one would spend a lot of time cruising the old growth Doug Fir and Ponderosa stands on the edges of the ugliest, steepest rocks one could locate.

I had all of a 5 count to ascertain this guy had the required amount of horn before he and another ram began to vacate the general vicinity. It was about 80yds give or take and as he tensed up to run, he looked ahead, showed me how long the curl was and received a 180gr Hornady out of a battered BBR '06 I used back then. My goodness that's a youngster in that photo isn't it?



It was not in any way, shape or form the "classic" sheep hunt where a fellow makes an eyeball sore from looking through the spotter counting the annular rings.

Anyway, again I'd say that if the OP's buddy is hunting an area where the rams get pressured from predators much at all AND the season is earlier in fall then a fast handling rifle will be the primary concern and other items very much incidental afterward.

In looking at Brad's elk photos, I get the impression his elk hunting spots wouldn't be too, too different from where we'd chase rams.

As always Sam, there's many ways to get to a destination and that's only been our experience here with the locals.

Merry Christmas to you and yours Sam.

Dwayne

Dwayne, those are awesome pics my man! Thanks!

Oh yeah, great pics and commentary Dwayne!



Merry Christmas to your family as well.

Dwayne,

You bring up some good points.

Apparently where the guy will be hunting is a VERY limited draw area--which is what we have here in Montana, except for a few unlimited areas. I am pretty familiar with some of our areas and their sheep, due to having scouted many over the years, while hoping to draw a tag, plus hunting one area myself for a ewe, and going along with other people on various hunts.

In general, the sheep in the draw areas are pretty damn tame, because they rarely get hunted. A friend and I used to canoe the Missouri River through the Breaks the first week of the rifle season for mule deer (which is several weeks into the bighorn season), and often ran into sheep. Somewhere I still have a photo of my friend aiming (but not shooting) at a BIG ram standing 60-75 yards away, looking at us as if he was inspecting a likely ewe.

I also accompanied the same friend on a late-season ewe hunt (his tag) in the Rock Creek area, then famous for big rams. We found "his" ewe running around on a steep and snowy mountainside about 2000 feet above us, being chased by more than one ram. We climbed up there and my buddy shot the ewe at maybe 100 yards, and as we field-dressed it a HUGE ram stood on a rock outcropping 30 yards above us, looking down as curiously as the Breaks ram. As we dragged the ewe back down the mountain, we ran across at number of big, mature rams at easy rifle range.

When I drew my ewe tag a few years ago for a local herd near the town we live in, shortly after the season opened in mid-September I found a ewe/lamb herd at the base of some cliffs. On the hike up to the cliffs I passed within less than 300 yards of a herd of six mature rams, bedded down on an open slope. They never even stood up as I passed by.

Could relate a bunch of other stories, but in general the difficulty in getting a ram in our draw areas doesn't involve getting within easy range. Instead it involves finding THE ram (some are so well-known they acquire nicknames until some lucky tag-holder kills them). Sometimes this requires considerable hiking, but sometimes it just involves glassing from roads during the rut.

The unlimited areas are an entirely different story.

John;
Thanks for the clarification sir, it makes all the difference having that information for sure.

When folks see the Bighorns in our national parks and watch the herds in the wintering areas they sometimes get the mistaken idea all sheep are like that year round.

A good friend in Whitehorse chases sheep up there in the alpine and again that's a different set of rules and tactics.

Thanks again for taking the time to supply the very interesting details John, as usual I've learned something from you.

All the best to you and Eileen this Christmas.

Dwayne

Whenever there's wind

IME anything over about 5-6 mph can start to show the difference between slippery and less slippery bullets over 400 yards.

Some redneck several years ago said something like "load partitions, shut up and go hunting". Wouldn't know about that myself.
Charlie

How about 15-25mph and gusty then? I'm not even a great shot and I can crack rocks and gongs out to 900 with a 7RM and 160 AB's under 10mph.

I'm all about taking every advantage I can, personally. I've seen enough critters die with VLD type bullets to know they work very well on game and do better in wind than less sleek bullets.... And that's all I need to know.

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