This little guy was just the cutest kitten ever! He had a fun personality, and loved to snuggle, so I kitten-napped him every chance I got. 😄😄
And come evening time he looked cold, so I just had to help him stay warm!
Anyway, I’m sure there were other things that went on at that family get together, but all I remember is the pussy. 😄😄🤷♂️
When we got back home Sunday, we spent the rest of the day buried in the office, trying to catch up on the mountain of paperwork, estimates, and everything else that seems to come with running a small business that’s no fun.
Monday morning it was back to the hunt-or more correctly-back on the gun to figure out if there was something wrong with our gear, us, or both.
Our rifle had been used on last year’s hunt, where I got a great bull elk, and went back into the safe where it stayed all year, so we didn’t really expect any issues. Did the scope come loose? Did the action come loose? Did I input something wrong in the ballistics app? Did Denise just get the jitters and bobble the shot? It was time to find out.
The first thing I did was torque check the scope and action screws-everything was still tight and no signs of movement. Then I took this opportunity to do something I had been trying to get to for several months-after many months of waiting, the guns new muzzle device had finally showed up, so I swapped that out. Then a quick bore check, and Denise and I loaded up and headed out to our local range-a big clearing on the local rancher’s property with some steel targets.
The first thing to do was torque check see if we were even on the steel at close range, and to make sure that the new muzzle device was functioning properly, so we set up at 200 yards and lobbed a few test shots to see what was up.
Here’s Denise getting ready to test our new hush-a-boom.
And here it is in action. The recoil from a 300 RUM is pretty legit, but thankfully the somewhat heavy rifle and can make it manageable. Denise would send some 20 rounds down range this morning and her eyes got tired before her shoulder did.
If you listen closely, you can hear the bullet hit the steel 200 yards down range.
In the end, we discovered that one of our biggest problems was some values that got messed up in our ballistics app. To try and make a long story short, several years ago we were using an app called Strelock Plus, which is a great ballistics app. The problem is, it’s author is based in Russia, and apparently there’s some war going on with Russia that our country disapproves of, and they have put restrictions in place on updating the app, so when we discovered this same accuracy issue a few years ago we traced it to the fact that while we could still use the app, we couldn’t change any of our bullet B/C data, and that was causing issues out past 400 yards. So at that time we switched to a Horaday ballistic app. But for some reason this year, all my account information, including the rifle/scope/load data was lost in THAT app. In frustration over not wanting to do the tedious job of re-entering all that nonsense, I went back to my Strelock app, where it APPEARED I was able to save my data changes, but wasn’t actually able to.
Ugg.
A call to a friend of ours who is the sniper for the sheriff’s department and my go-to for long range shooting questions for obvious reasons directed me to yet another app, where I spent an hour or so entering in all the data for our equipment.
After that, Denise and I spent most of the morning testing different ranges with the app and the rifle out to about 550 yards with mostly acceptable results. We felt better, but not as good as we’d like, but considering the shifting wind gusts that were well into the 20+ mph range, we got it as dialed as we could.
The rest of the day the wind was forecast to get even stronger, and with that we decided to call it a day and go back to work in the office for the rest of the day in an attempt to catch up there, and hope for better weather on Tuesday.