Gun Owning Smokers

[CptnBlues63]

I was born and raised in Drayton Valley (1 1/2hr west of Edmonton). Served my time in the oil patch The majority of my hunting was in the Nordegg area as well as chasing the elusive Trophy Elk in the Ya Ha Tinda ranch area. I have been giving some thought to going up north hunting and will check out canadiangunnutz.

We are getting close to ice fishing season and I live on a lake where Walleye is in season in the winter. Our little community basically moves out on the ice come Jan/Feb. Looks like a scene off Grumpy old men

LOL

I've never been a huge fan of ice fishing. Probably because I don't own a good hut,heater and power auger.........LOL My old bones can't take laying on the ice. But I have gone a few times and it's not hard to imagine sitting in a nice warm hut sipping something tasty while smoking a good cigar!

I'm off to the range in a couple hours with my one hunting partner in order to sight his gun in. It's my old Savage 99 lever action that I sold him. I picked it up so I'd have a spare just in case but it doesn't have the removable magazine but instead the built in 5 round rotary the Savage 99 is famous for. I prefer a removable as it's quicker and safer to both load and unload. I picked up another 99C last year just before hunting season and managed to bag an elk and a nice 5x5 whitetail with it. So anyhow, I put new scope mounts on it for him and mounted his scope and bore sighted it. Now to get it set........we leave Thursday! I'm bringing the 1911, the Rugers (Mark III Hunter and Super Single Six convertible .22lr/.22magnum) and my main hunting rifle as well so he can do a couple shots with it and check out the new scope. Once he's properly zeroed in, we're going to burn up some pistol ammo!

[CptnBlues63]

We had a pretty good day at the range. My hunting partner's rifle is now zeroed at 250 yards and he's ready to rock. I ran a quick group of 3 at 100 yds with my Savage 99C with the Swarovski on it and you could have covered the group with a dime. All three rounds overlapped. Yep, I'm ready!

I forgot to bring all the .45 acp and only had about 50 rounds so we burnt those off. Terry brought a brick of some Winchester .22 LR and I had a brick of some Winchester .22 I hadn't opened yet. I will never buy that ammo again. First, the lead was fractionally longer than any other .22 shell I've bought in the last couple years so they didn't feed through my Ultimate Clip Loader
http://www.mcfaden.com/cliploader.html
So I was reduced to loading the magazines for my Mark III Hunter by hand. That gets tiring and annoying fairly quickly (say about 300 rounds) so we didn't blow off all that ammo.

Second, they weren't ejecting properly and I've never had a shell that didn't before in my Mark III hunter and it's had at least 5000+ put through it in the time I've owned it. I'd like to blame it on the cool weather (it was a few degrees below freezing) but I've shot that gun under those temps many times without issue. Oh well, it's cleaned, oiled against rust and put away now for the winter.

Third, the same ammo was sticking in my Single Six. There were a couple empty brass I almost couldn't get to come back out of the cylinder. I'm not sure wtf is up with that, but like I said, I'll never buy Winchester .22 LR's again! I'm going to have to give these to somebody else as I'm not at all interested in shooting them through anything else.

Well, I'm almost 100% ready to go for my annual hunting trip. I have a couple "preload" items to put in the trailer and then it's just load what has to be loaded the morning I leave. I'm out of here Thursday morning and very much ready to go!