I read every word Bob Milek wrote when I was a kid in the 80s, I lived in Pa. and dreamed of seeing what Bob seen on his hunts..... I now lived just over the Bighorns from the area Bob did and am happy !!!!
That being said I hunt elk with a 7x57 because of people like Finn AAgard and JB.........
Interesting comment about Aagard. He didn't have much published in Oz at the time but I bought his book about 20 years back and in it he stated, that he had witness the largest number of one shot kills in Africa from the .270 Winchester.
After writing so much about the 7x57 when he got his cherished BRNO imported from Kenya, he reamed it out to .280. That did puzzle me until I started doing that myself "Just to see" what the next in line would do.
I never liked Milek's stories on the .30/06 as he always listed handloading data akin to indoor mouse safari loads, until I started using a .30/06 to cull and realized he was completely correct. It simply didn't matter whether that 180 grain bullet was doing 2625fps in a pathetic factory load or 2800fps in a manicured handload, the damn things still fell over dead.
At that point, I started digesting what I was seeing more objectively and started to notice that caliber "seemed" to play a larger role in performance moreso than velocity in "some cases".
Now I can quite fairly contradict myself here, as I also saw velocity make a larger difference that caliber in "some cases" and to quote one, I saw more dramatic performance from the .257 Weatherby than I did from the .270 Winchester. I saw the same performance from the 6.5x55 Swede compared to the .270.
In reality to the masses, everything works, which makes the rifle more important that the cartridge and the bullet more relevant to the game being hunted.
The .270 worked for Aagard for the same reason the .25/06 worked for Milek, Shootability. If it is more pleasant to use, the average hunter can place the bullet more accurately because concentration is not taxed by recoil and muzzle blast. This makes standard bullet perform as well as they did before the premiums came along with the vengeance we have experienced over the last 25 years. Lucky us!
Therein, lies the secret that most try not to discover as competence and reliability is apparently, just too boring.
John
