Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Ok, .243 on moose

Skatchewan;
First off sir, thank you for making the opportunities available for your son to hunt. That takes time and effort on your part to be sure, but I'm certain the rewards will be lifelong for both of you.

If I was going to guess by your handle here, you might know the areas of which I'm about to speak? I grew up eating moose that came from east of Erwood and Hudson Bay area that my late father would bring home to our farm near Churchbridge from his annual hunt there.

For a hunting rifle he started off with a borrowed surplus SMLE and then bought a Savage 99 off of a trapper friend from the Erwood area. It was a .250-3000 and if foggy memory serves we ate at least 3 moose that died in front of it before he traded it off for a Winchester Model 100.

On the subject of recoil tolerance, while I could write a small book on my mistakes trying to find what our two daughters could shoot well, the short version is that one now shoots a .250AI and the other a 6.5x55.

While they've only been killing deer with them thus far, I'd say that based upon what we've seen doing the postmortems there that the 6.5 might be a wee bit more forgiving of less than perfect shot placement.

That said, the little .250AI has resulted in some very abrupt endings that impressed me - a sometime .300/.338 Mag shooter - to no end.

While I realize the .250AI isn't a .243, I'd be quite surprised if it wasn't capable of very similar results.

Lastly, as of late we've been running 130gr TSX in the 6.5 and 80gr TTSX in the .250AI and have been extremely pleased with the results.

Hopefully that was some use to you Skatchewan. All the best luck to you and your son on the moose hunt whichever way you decide.

Regards,
Dwayne