re: Newbie Hunting Questions

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You’re making this way harder than it has to be for some fella hunting PUBLIC LAND in the woods of North Carolina.

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You're ignoring logic because it goes against the terrible advice you were given. Like many (the dirty truth is that it's actually most, as the average Joe rifle hunters are terrible shooters as a whole), you don't know what you're talking about. All these pieces of advice for socks and climbing stands for a new outdoorsman who doesn't even know how to sight in a rifle, and the most important piece of advice he should be getting is wrong. Talk about putting the cart ahead of the horse. This is what hunting culture has let the gear industry do to it: out with woodsmanship and in with the gear queers. It doesn't matter how damn light his climber is, he needs to be on a bench learning his weapon and making vital decisions on what he wants out of it for his given situation at their most extremes, and that advice needs to be sound, not some ridiculous, illogical, arbitrary catch all number that cripples him when - not IF - he is faced with the scenario where he must quickly determine a range, and if that range is slightly too far but not at all out of the ordinary, he must then think about doping his shot because he was told to zero for 150 yards. What you're unsurprisingly failing to realize is that my way - zeroing his rifle for 275-300 yards depending on his load - IS the easy method: Point and shoot from 0 to 300 yards. It's that simple. Not from 0 to 200 (at best) like you're telling him, but 0 to 300+. Logic: learn it, love it, live it.quote:which at your point in the hunting journey is probably 150 yards TOO FAR for him to attempt at this stage. Completely fabricated nonsense. Any outdoorsman with half my experience knows that's not the way it works. If anything, him being a novice for at least the next 5 years all but guarantees he'll be faced with multiple scenarios outside of your utopian situation quoted above. That's not the way it works in the field when the biggest buck of his young career is broadside crossing a half acre green field at daylight going to bed but he's at 235 yards so now he's thinking about holdover when he didn't have to. You're imagining something that isn't reality. That makes me question your experience level as a woodsman, if any. He should sight his rifle in to be zeroed at 275 yards. Not 150 yards. If he wants to cut his point and shoot range down by at least 100 yards so that whenever he's inevitably faced with a longer shot (of which the possibility arising because of his beginner status is magnified), then he should take your poor advice. If he wants to be able to point and shoot from 0 to 300+ yards, he should take my advice. Period. End of story. It's that simple, it's just a hard pill to swallow because your way was peepaw's way. I get it. I used to do it too before I got into benchrest and applying its principles to the field. I'm a member of one of the oldest, biggest deer camps in the southeast. I watch dozens upon dozens of "seasoned" adult male hunters wound and maim dozens upon dozens of deer a year, year after year, because of this exact mentality because, again, that's the way peepaw and uncle Buck did it. Unfortunately, more often than can be stomached, many are mature, once in 5 to 10 year bucks that are either never recovered, or give up their meat to the tax man. What's even worse is that so many are maimed from a stand hunted out of 15+ times a year (no excuse for unfamiliarity) where it should've been a chip shot powerline 275 yard kill with their 6th rotation rifle chambered in their new and improved 300 Weatherby Super Short Magnum Mag Man Mag, but because they're having to dope it on top of fight adrenaline instead of being proficient, they add to the error and we lose an animal because of stubborness, ignorance, and lack of skill. Yours and the other poster's absolutely atrocious advice is not surprising. Frustrating, because you're terribly uninformed regarding riflemanship giving an absolutely novice beginner awful advice on the #1 most important hunting tool he has, but not surprising. I can say with authority, Oper, especially for a new hunting brother coming into the fold like yourself who knows next to nothing on rifles and their application in the field: disregard the awful advice for 1" high at 100, as well as the first one saying zero at 100, and take my advice. The best thing you can do as a novice is familiarize yourself with maximum point blank range, apply its principles to your situation, and you'll know more than at least 3 hunters on this thread, along with an embarrassingly large number of whitetail hunters who had decades to learn how to outfit, shoot, and become proficient with their weapon but did not.

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1. Should I pick up a sled? 2. Should I establish a relationship with a deer processor before I even go hunting, in-case I get lucky and actually shoot one? 3. What yardage is everyone zeroing to? 4. Anything else I should take into account?

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mudshuvl05

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The deal is shooting downhill or uphill causes bullet to hit high.

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