Moose Droppings

Importance of Sighting In

Apr 20, 2007 @ 09:03 am by Moose

This weeks Outdoor Section in the N&O had an interesting article about sighting in your turkey gun to help you understand how it shoots. I’m a firm believer in this practice and even though I know that little changes from year to year I still sight my gun in prior to the season. I think we owe it to the animal to make sure we can make a clean humane kill.

As the article says you’ll get a wide variety of results when you change choke tubes, change shot size, brand, and shell size. You’ll want to use a full or extra full choke tube and maybe even move into the aftermarket choke tube selection. I use an Undertaker that is designed for Hevi Shot and it works great. Use a turkey target and count your pellets that hit the kill zone granted you only need one to hit and break the neck or hit the brain but you really want o see multiple hits in the kill zone.

The cost of using a variety of shot sizes and brands to figure out what shoots best in your set up can be a big obstacle to many of us. (I think Hevi Shot runs around $3 or so a round) One thing that we do is often a group of us gets together to sight in and we each buy a different shot size brand so we all can try a wide variety to see what works best. For my set up I use 3” Hevi Shot # 5 but that may not be exactly what your gun likes.

Misses

A topic we don’t like to talk about but one many of us have had experience with is the misses. The reasons for misses most often are a distance problems either to close or to far. To close your pattern is so tight that it’s really easy to miss that’s why I like to see especially for new hunters is a bird that is in the 25 yard range. The other reason is to far we all have at one time or another difficulty with judging distance. Another good use for decoys because it gives you a marked distance provided you pace it off so you know. If you’re not using decoys remembering some landmarks will help you when the big boy comes in.

There are those occasional misses that are similar to the ones we have during deer season that we attribute to “Buck Fever” but we won’t talk about them. Just pattern the gun and be ready to lay the smack down on Tom this season.