Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game First antelope hunt imminent.... advice?

Yer missing a front scope cap and blue muzzle tape

Nice 'lope jeff. Congrats.

Wood and bluing. You really have to take better pictures - or maybe you did but not for public consumption, but really, I hope you have a better photo than that.

Glad you survived your goat rodeo.

You cut that cape a little short?

Kinda surprised this being a trophy hunt that takes years to accumulate enough points to draw a tag, yet you claim you only have a few crappy photo's?

And you must not intend to mount it? ,,,,, too bad because the cape is a large part of the trophy.

That goat deserves to be mounted, are you going to throw the horns in the yard for the dogs to chew on?

Congrats Jeff thats a nice first or last antelope buck - they are all beautiful IMHO! Glad you had a good hunt and got to break in the new rifle.
Now that you have one antelope down you can start going to Wyoming to chase then every year

Perceptive!

I'll give details later, drivin home

Lookin' like a bit of meat damage there

Nice goat.........

Bravo.





Clark

Just returned from a trip to visit young son back east. Fortified the many reasons I have for living in the west.

Good going Jeff-O, Need to hear the rest of the story.

Safe trip home,

Looks like the blue muzzle tape got used to attach the tag to the horn. (I'm afraid to ask where the scope cap wound up.)

Congrats on a successful hunt, nice one.

Congrats, Jeff.

Sounded like you enjoyed the hunt and it was memorable...that's a win.


P.S. That Mosaic ain't a bad IPA at all....

Euro pronghorn are sweet.

Ivory tips are a sign of an older buck, but I do believe it has more to do with genetics than anything else.

Nice 'lope in any event...you throw a tape on him yet? 12-13" length?

Appears to be pretty decent cutters/mass.



Get that hide off the skull!

Love that skinning rack...great idea! I have only bagged 2 pronghorns in all my hunting career. One in Wyoming and one in N. Arizona. My only advice is have
a darn good spotting scope, a good pair of 10x binoculars, and bring a lot of patience and your flattest shooting rifle. My favorite load has always been
my .270 Win with 130gr. Nosler Accubonds. Good luck and hope you get the speed buck! A beautiful and awesome trophy!

Thanks much guys.

I was thinking he was pretty dinky, but at camp other hunters kept saying he was a pretty good buck. Who knew?!

Sammo, my plan for mounting it is as follows: hang the head from a tree way out in my woods and let Sasquatch and bugs clean it up this winter. What could go wrong <grin>?

Tom, the heat had me thinking of your problems with heat in deer season down there! It's kind of a big deal. I've got the meat on ice in coolers and I'm just going to have to age it a bit that way. Uh.... does antelope meat benefit from a little aging like deer venison does?

Irfubar, it was 90+ degrees, bright as GOD, and my iPhone camera couldn't handle it. The pics look sepia almost. Wasn't any point in trying to stage some hero shot and I was more than a little concerned about the heat. The pic that matters to me is the "as he lay" pic; that's what I saw walking up, that's my memory of it. So there.

Mojo, yes sir it is a very fine IPA. I'm a big fan of great IPA's in cans. Very consistent carbonation, and always fresh.

Ok so here's my story.

The backstory: I built that rifle from a bare action, well north of $2k in parts... plus the NF scope, I'm carrying over $3k in outlay... only relevant due to what I describe below... and many months of major obsessing. Tom and Jordan were privy to some of that; I think they were pretty sick of hearing about it <g>. Add in a ton of practice at long range for years now and I'm really feeling saucy about my rifle and skillz.

So I'm sort of trundling along out in the sage, tail end of my 2nd big hike-and-glass expedition of the day, hot as Hades, and this guy appears in front of me. He must have been bedded and stood up to see what strange beast was slouching through his desert. About 150 yards away. Horns are backlit, holy [bleep] here's my buck. I toss my rifle up. Chip shot. Gaaa! I can't see anything through my scope. The hell? I realize the front BC flip up is broken; it's just hanging there, no spring to pop it up. I wrap my thumb up over the barrel to hold it open. The adrenaline is hitting and I'm completely flustered now and in an awkward position with my damn front hand. He starts to turn to run; I miss, badly. He runs. The next two shots are a comedy of me trying to cycle rounds, hold the [bleep] cap open, and shoot a running antelope. Side note: they are FAST <g>. I miss. Twice. One round left. He STOPS, broadside, at maybe 225, 250 now. This is my last chance. I'm still in this ridiculous front hand position. Failure looms as a distinct probability. I muster up the presence of mind to take a deep breath and let the rifle settle. Boom! He takes off again but I can tell I killed him by how he's running, and sure enough he piles up in a cloud of dust and a flash of white belly fur out in the sage.

Turns out the little pin had backed out of the hinge enough to let the little coil spring that flips the cap pop out and get bent. Tried to get the tiny little thing bent properly back but it's toast. I'm sure BiMart will give me a new one. But the lessons of the day were a) to add that to the list of things I check on at least every now and then, and b) that a $12 plastic accessory can screw up your whole day no matter how well you think you've prepared. And also, that I kind of go all to pieces in that situation; I need to do some military/aviation type "failure drills".

Thinking lll take my soldering iron and sort of "stake" the pins in my Butler Creeks via a dab of melted plastic.

So that's my story! Funny chit. But man did I have a good time up there. The comraderie and intel-sharing between camps was really something. Just great folks. And Steens is one of the most purely sublime places I know of. Word to the wise.

Data point: it's a 6.5 SAUM, so a couple hundred fps faster than a Creed... I used the 140 ELD-M. It hit a rib going in, did sort of "normal" damage to the lungs, then hit a rib going out and left a quarter-size exit wound. Pretty much perfect I'd say. I'm going to use the bullet for deer here in a few weeks so we'll see how that goes but it definitely did not fly to flinders (damn I miss BobinNH!) and it killed the heck out of the antelope. Phenomenally accurate bullet as well, of course.

Well done!! Pronghorn hunts are near the top of my favorites list.