Let the fun begin! (2 Viewers)

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Fly Rod

Fly Rod

Joined
May 23, 2005
Threads
275
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Location
Ashland, OR
Bow season opens Saturday!:bounce::bounce2:

I am leaving tomorrow to set up camp. I hope to have some elk in the freezer before too long! For all the other archers in the group, shoot strait and split some hairs!!!!
 
Hoping for beginers luck, first season with a bow!
 
We ended up with one bear and some great video from our trail cam. See my post in the hunting and fishing thread.

I didn't write up our 357 experience from the weekend. The bear my friend shot was not real well hit. I gave my partner my new S&W when we started tracking. We found the bear with some life left in him. I told my friend to aim carefully for a spine shot at the base of the neck. He missed and put one through the shoulders and lung. The bear got up and came at him. He shot three more rounds which staggard the bear. After he fell back still breathing I took the gun and put one more shot into his neck. We only recovered one bullet from the off side of the first shot. Other than the rifling there was no deformation of the bullet.

This was not a big bear and I am now considering using a load like the DPX for the first shot. I am thinking some expansion to dump energy would be a good idea??
 
What bullet where you using? I thought the mushrooming expansion factor was a huge deal in dropping game, like the reason you can't hunt deer with a .223 FMJ, just rips right through without a good knockdown/kill factor.

I am no hunter but reading my Cabelas & American Rifleman religiously I see a lot about bullet expansion. Might be a fun trip to the range for real world bullet expansion testing...now who has the recipe for ballistics gel?
 
TOY350 said:
Who is our appointed club chef? This looks fun!
Click to expand...

It does. I've always wanted to make ballistics gel and candy glass (fake glass ala the movies).
 
I had the 357 loaded with hard cast bullets. For a "oh s***" gun you want as much penetration as you can get. The idea is to make a central nervous system hit and STOP him. Hard cast bullets are not designed to expand at all. This is what it looked like after the shot:

IMG_3154.jpg


An expanding bullet can work against you if you have to make a head on kill shot. On a big worked up boar you may need a hard cast bullet in the brain to stop it. A mushrooming bullet can "splatter" on the skull and fail to do the job. I guess I will stick with hard cast for the worste case scenario.
 
In a worse case senario wouldn't you want a round that you could place in a soft tissue area to cause maximum damage. Opposed to a FMJ or hard cast round that is good for armor, or in this case cranium, penetrating shots. If I was looking for a "one shot, one kill" head shot I'd most likely choose a FMJ or hard cast round, however, heat of the moment spray and pray style shooting I'd personally choose maximum damage with less than perfect accuracy. My two cents for what they're worth.
 
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knoll0351 said:
In a worse case senario wouldn't you want a round that you could place in a soft tissue area to cause maximum damage. Opposed to a FMJ or hard cast round that is good for armor, or in this case cranium, penetrating shots. If I was looking for a "one shot, one kill" head shot I'd most likely choose a FMJ or hard cast round, however, heat of the moment spray and pray style shooting I'd personally choose maximum damage with less than perfect accuracy. My two cents for what they're worth.
Click to expand...

I'll give you a plug nickle for your $.02!:lol: JK

I would say you are correct in a hunting situation. In a tracking wounded bear situation things are different.

This case is a good example. We were on our hands and knees tracking this bear in heavy dead fall. Often you could not see over the next dead log. Yet you had to find one drop of blood in the huckleberries to stay on track. We got lucky and spotted him far enough off to get into position for a shot. It could have been him popping over a log ready to go. In that case you don't have time and need a cns shot to stop them. The only way to guarentee an imeadiate stop is absolute penetration of the cns. The only way to guarentee absolute penetration is hard cast lead.

Just my thoughts on saving my hide.

:cheers:
 
What are the odds of scoring a cns shot in the heat of the moment save your life the bear is right here situation? I would think in that situation you are letting the lead fly and just hoping to hit the thing and a bullet with expansion would be doing more internal damage and have a better knock down potential at that point.

Again I don't hunt and have no real world knowledge of taking down a bear; I am just thinking of what seems logical to me, feel free to enlighten me :cheers:
 
I'd always heard that a shotgun with some spread is the best for a charging bear as to increase the chances of hitting something vital (IE: piercing open mouth, eyes, etc).

But what do I know, I don't hunt. :meh:
 
TOY350 said:
What are the odds of scoring a cns shot in the heat of the moment save your life the bear is right here situation? I would think in that situation you are letting the lead fly and just hoping to hit the thing and a bullet with expansion would be doing more internal damage and have a better knock down potential at that point.

Again I don't hunt and have no real world knowledge of taking down a bear; I am just thinking of what seems logical to me, feel free to enlighten me :cheers:
Click to expand...

Picture a bear head on. There is little to no vitals exposed other than the cns. The head on shot opportunities are cranium/spine, shoulders and heart. A heart shot will stop them, eventually. A shoulder shot may change thier approach angle or maybe not. The cranium/spine is the best stop shot.

It is certainly a difficult target to hit. That is why we practice, practice and practice some more.

Gabe,

A shotgun would be ideal but difficult to carry on a bow hunt.

:cheers:
 
So after the bow and then after the .357 it comes down to wrestling with a Rambo knife? :flipoff2: Please tell me you carry one, after the wrestling match and assuming you win you can always sew yourself back up! Am I right?!?

Ok, well I did have one as a kid and it was the bomb :D

Alright, I now am picturing the bear head on and do see that the cranium and spine are largely exposed. The .357 is easier to pack than a .44 mag or the Desert Eagle .50.
 
At the risk of sounding argumentative I'm going to have to disagrea. With a human target you do have multiple shock opportunities (each time a human being is shot we expeirience shock), however, with an animal you only have the first shot to induce shock (most theories atribute this to their lack of reasoning). So with this being said I would ideally hope to stop brain function with a brain stem shot first off, or a distance shot into vital organs.
When tracking I would have to look at the worse case scenario, which is likely with a wounded animal, I would want maximum damage with poor shooting. In my experience, which is of the two legged variety, when the presure is on it is much more dificult for most shooters to put steel on target accurately. With the extensive training and regular shooting of our special opperations troops, Marines, or "Opperators" it is rather unlikely that we will miss a critical shot. That being said we are still trained to group our double shot group in the "center of mass" maximizing the likelyhood of a critical hit. Under presure even "opperators" are trained for the "safe" shot into the largest target, not the head shot (unless special opps orders dictate a change in SOP) because it is a smaller more dificult target. So when it's my life on the line I'm going to stick with a quote I heard years ago "the ideal weapon lets alot of blood out and alot of air in"

I also did a bit of surfing for bear hunting with a handgun and came up with this:
Handgun Bear Hunting
 
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