Tell us your sure easy shot you missed & why!

Lets tell the one that got away that should have fell & maybe why.
I will start it off.
Doe day, brown is down day in deer rifle season.
This place is so loaded with deer we just promised not to shoot a doe early
but hold out for a nice buck we had been seeing in the dark on our way out
of this huge farm.
Comes noon I have a big doe at 5 yards, the weapon is a 270 Weatherby
Magnum loaded with 90 grain hollow point -reloads- leaving the barrel at
what I have to remember was somewhere around 3700 fps.
There is thick autumn olive brush between us but I can even see her eyes
blinking. I aim behind the shoulder, squeeze the trigger & boom.
She stands there as if nothing happened & actually eased on her way by.
The fellow beside me said what happened? Shoot again.
I said no she deserves to live after that.
Of course now we know what happened, --the younger me-- was shooting in
brush with an open woods coyote bullet, so impressed with how fast the
new bullet traveled I ignored the fact that bullets at that weight & speed
actually disintegrate at the least contact & you can't plow thru brush with
it.
Glad she wasn't wounded or wasted.
Now there, that's my confession, or are you one of the, never missed
fellows.
But at 5 yards & didn't even dust her.

MCgunner said:

Doe at about 125 yards dead to rights with a very accurate 7 mag Savage 110. Scope was messed up, recoil got to it. Needless to say, I never bought another Simmons Whitetail, replaced it with a Weatherby Supreme (no longer available) that's still on it.

That rifle came with a cheap Bushnell Sportview that never gave me a problem....go figure.

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I have 2 rifles that kill scopes, most of them were old Simmons & the, dare I say it --- Tasco---.
The rifles are Springfield 1903 competition built 30.06 & that 270 Weatherby Mag I mentioned in
my story.
But to repair the Tasco statement, in my beginning days I put an new Tasco Golden Antler on a Rem 7600
in 30.06 that never failed & I harvested 16 deer with it. And to beat all I still have it, the parallax is
perfect for any range from 125 yards in. It is on a Rem model 513 now.
Most are Leupolds & Nikons now.

1976B.L.Johns. said:

O.K., I'll fess up on a story that happened about twenty years ago. Early morning walking to where I had plan to hunt for the day, enough light to shoot when I looked to my right to see a nice buck maybe 30 yards away at the most, standing broadside in a small opening. Pushed the safety off as I shouldered my sporterized U.S. Model 1917 Remington. (This is going to be easy, I thought) Boom...still standing there, huh?, emptied the rifle, shoved in 3 more rounds as the buck is still in place looking at me. Fired 3 more. Still standing there!!! Put in one more round for the killing shot as he walked away! Took me most of morning to figure out that I had, (the fictitious) "Buck Fever". I was stacking up the peep sights rather than looking through them.......Oh well, live and learn!

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Did the same thing bow hunting from an old building one time, opening day 5 point buck.
Had a trigger operated sight, can't remember the name of it. But I had set it the night before at 20
yards, my son in law looked at the bow a while & obviously moved the sight up & down to see it
work - he admitted it later- but I should have looked at it that morning.
I shot almost all my arrows at the buck & kept calling him back in for shots till I was down to one
arrow.
I had him so close then that all I could see thru the shooting hole was deer hair. I drilled him good
then but the damage was done with the tunnel vision of buck fever not checking my sight after
the first shot.

marksman13 said:

Doe last year at 200 yards. Shot right over her back, twice. Had been to the range shooting the 600 yard gong that afternoon and didn't dial back to 0. Most embarrassed I have ever been in the deer stand. Didn't help that my wife and a good friend were with me.

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Sounds like one of mine with an easy bow shot.
One hour after daylight!
Drew on a big doe walking from my right to my left at 35 yards, followed her to a gap & just as I
was about to touch the release I hear a single step below my tree stand,
A 3 point buck was standing at 5 yards watching her walk by I rotate the bow turn, bend at the waist
aim & release with my sight at 35 yards. Of course I missed & he was gone & so was she.
An odd point of this encounter was that I was half a mile in deep woods & had my tree stand in there
from the day before. I had sprayed some Tinks on the ground under my tree to cover my scent from the
work of putting up the stand & when I approached the tree the same 3 point was bedded down exactly
where I had sprayed. It wasn't daylight yet so I just kept walking to the tree talking to him, he was reluctant to leave
& didn't get up until I was almost on top of him & then just enough to get out of my way & wander around
for at least 2 minutes before he disappeared in the dark & me talking to him the whole time, sort of
like whistling in the dark because he was a really big body animal & sharing the same space was
unsettling. Lots of people say they would have put an arrow in & shot him with the flashlight in their
bow hand. Well my Grandfather was a Game Warden & what I have inside me came from him & his
straight up fair chase ways from the 1950's, so there have been several other encounters that have
tested me with even much larger deer & bear.
That would be a good question to ask, about what any of us could have done but didn't.

Patocazador said:

Too many to list but one that sticks in my mind is an incident that happened when I first started hunting deer seriously. I was on my first hunting trip out-of-state in Wyoming for an antelope/mule deer hunt. I brought 2 guns, a 7mm mag and a .25-06 as a backup. While hunting antelope the first day with the 7mm mag, we spotted a freak antelope just over a rise about 75 yards away. I got flustered and fished around in my pocket for a cartridge. I inserted it and fired at the ''freak" antelope with crazy horns. The gun sounded funny and soot and some fire singed my face. The antelope acted like it was wounded so I tried to jack in another round but the bolt wouldn't lift. I finally pounded it open and pried out an exploded .25-06 case. It had ripped open on two sides like a peeled banana. The guide handed me his rifle so I could finish off the wounded antelope.

Since then I only carry the .25-06 and ammo for it .. no other cartridges for other calibers.

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At least you will never do that again, I have a friend who had done this same thing with different calibers
3, count it 3 times while target shooting & sighting rifles in.
I have 1 maybe 2 of the spent cases in my --never-- do this jar.

WestKentucky said:

Another one comes to mind. I went hunting early in the morning after a late night out carousing, probably still smelled of the various beverage establishments I had visited...got to my parking spot and started getting all my field gear on. Getting the rifle out of the truck in a hurry I managed to hit the shifter and knock the truck out of gear, luckily had the parking brake set so it didn’t roll very much before I could hop back in and fix the issue. 30 minutes later I had a couple bucks fighting in front of me. Easy shot at roughly 125 yards right next to the spot where I sighted the rifle in at 150 yards a couple weeks before. Not trophy deer, but respectable deer, and they were bigger than anything I had shot at that time, so I took very careful aim and sent a bullet. Nothing. Shot the gun empty and they were still fighting. Started single loading rounds into the gun and kept firing until they ran off. Had maybe 3 rounds left out of a full box. Turns out that I had hit the shifter with the scope hard enough to cause paint transfer from the shifter to the scope ring.

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You need to have a bayonet attachment don't you!

WestKentucky said:

I could have used a bayonet a couple times. I once had a spike buck step over my feet while carefully eyeing the clearing I was hunting over. Couldn't resist, I slapped him on the butt. He ran to 20 yards turned around and started acting like he was gonna charge. I laughed at first but he was mad. Revolver deer #2.

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I could tell one but everyone would think I was a liar, I even have my wife as a witness.
I will just say this we both saw a deer knock it's self out, for about 2 minutes it just lay there.