| Springtime in Georgia | |
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Page Two
Sunday morning I headed out with Ashley and his son Barrett, hunting for turkey. He dropped me off at a good listening post where I'd hopefully hear some gobbling, and headed down a bit farther. After leaning against a power pole for a while, I finally heard a distant gobble! I waited a bit to make sure I'd heard what I thought I'd heard and to be sure of which direction, and three minutes later I heard it again.
I headed down the grade in the direction of the gobbling, and after several minutes of hiking and hearing no gobbles, I stopped for a bit at a fork in the road. I hit a couple of gobbles on my box call, and he answered from afar, so I headed down the road to the left, heading in his general direction. A little farther on, I tried the gobble again, with no response. I hit a few loud raspy yelps, and boom! he gobbled back.
I headed on down the road and spotted a rise just ahead, forty or fifty yards distant. I figured I would hunker off the side at that rise and try to coax him into range -- he still sounded like he was a long ways off. Two more steps, and I'd blown it! He had been walking up the road towards me on the other side of the high spot, and as soon as he spotted me he turned and ran.
He was a good sixty yards out and heading away at a high lope, so I grabbed for my binocs rather than my shotgun. He was a big turkey -- possibly the biggest I've ever seen in the woods. If only I'd remembered the advice I'd read years earlier, which said when working toward a turkey, go until you figure you have about fifty more yards to go, and then hunker down there.
While we were hunting, Richard had added to the forms for the concrete boat ramp extension to be poured on Tuesday, and after that we got all the pieces of Richard's monstrosity (oops, I mean deer stand) moved down the road in Ken's four wheel drive truck, and hauled the biggest pieces down into his "hole," which is really a valley in these steep Georgia hills, lined with hardwoods. That was enough work on that project for one day, especially since the thermometers at camp were reading in the high 90s.
That afternoon, Ken and Richard went fishing while Dad and I headed to the on-site shooting range to try my new rifle. I was disappointed to find that the custom ammo Chris Rhyne had loaded for me was a bit long for the Savage's taste -- the rifling bit into the bullets considerably upon chambering. I will check with him further on this to see if it would be safe to seat the bullet a bit deeper (doing so always increases chamber pressure in any given load).
My handloads (with Hornady 180-grain bullets and IMR-4895 powder) produced fine accuracy, some of them shooting excellent four-shot one-hole groups at fifty yards, consistently much better than I'd ever gotten from the aforementioned Winchester. Pressures ran a tad high for the velocity, cratering primers on almost every load, with some flattening towards the high end (though not as much as the Winchester Super-X factory loads had done).
I was (and still am) quite pleased with that Savage 110. They are very accurate rifles, straight out of the box, and they perform well. I expect that with neck-sized fire-formed cases, accuracy will only improve, and I already consider it excellent.
Dad enjoyed shooting his M1 carbine, built by the Inland Division of General Motors during World War II in 1943. He even had some ammo built in that same year, which functioned fine and shot fairly accurately.
Monday morning Richard fixed us a nice big breakfast, to lure us into the Valley of the Shadow of Death to start building his stand. We got the posts set and the floor deck installed, added braces and ladder for his trap-door entry, and headed back for lunch.
Our first day's progress on Richard's Chateau.
After sandwiches and chips, we headed into Ken's valley to see what we were building for his stand. He'd gotten some steel warehouse shelving framework, and leveled and assembled it already. We took notes and cogitated a bit, and I was elected chief architect and engineer of the project. Then we headed to town to buy the material, and I also managed to find a set of Weaver extended scope rings, a bit higher than what I wanted but still workable for mounting the Burris on the Savage.
This is the framework for Ken's stand, which he had gotten set up on a prior occasion.
Ken and Richard headed out to fish again while Dad and I went to the range. I had a batch of loads with the same Hornady 180-grain bullets and Varget powder, and again I got good accuracy out of the '06. Dad shot some newer factory ammo in his carbine, which didn't do as well as the old GI stuff made in the 1940s and 50s.
Dad's job was supervising, at which he is extremely good.
- Russ Chastain
