ElevenBravo
Member
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2013
- Messages
- 70
(This is probably going to be a long post, so if you don't like reading hunting stories, you may want to find a more exciting thread to read)
Just completed a 3 day hog hunt in Texas with Mrs.11B. Between the two of us, we put down 1046 pounds of hog on the hoof, all of which are going to a local meat processor and then shipped back to 11B Manor. That is 7 hogs, the smallest was 120 pounds and the largest was 185.
This hunt was full of some weirdness that I haven't seen in previous hunts before, and I figured I'll pass on some observations while I'm at it in case anyone else is planning to go hoggin' soon.
First night, shot at 2 hogs: 1 at 50 yards at a rather steep angle, another at 150 yards. I was shooting my 300 WSM, pushing 220gr Nosler Partitions. I was doing some field tests as I intend to using them for an upcoming bear hunt.
First hog: no blood trail. None at all. Figured I had missed due to improperly factoring in the angle (I was 20 feet above him and 50 yards out).
Second hog: No blood trail.
Spend 30 minutes each trying to track the hogs. By this point, I figure something's wrong my my zero. It's dark, and the ranch owner decides to take a look around. We're 30 yards into some nasty, dense Texas undergrowth when I smell that unmistakable odor of hog. And not 10 yards from me, is the first one I shot at. Zero blood trail, almost pure luck we found it.
Look around some more and find some blood near where I shot the second hog, we start following it. More and more blood, soon it looks like he was gushing blood like a fountain, but he kept on going. Eventually, crawling on hands and knees under bushes, 150 yards from where he was shot, we finally found him.
The first hog was shot pretty much standard boiler room, both lungs gone and part of the liver. Decent exit wound but surprisingly little blood.
Second one: shot through the heart. Completely gone, pulped, liquified, destroyed. Dark red goo where the ticker was. This hog took a 220gr Partition from a 300 WSM and ran 150 yards before dying. Now, this reinforces mine and the ranch owner's opinion on the use of .223 to hunt hog. He doesn't allow it, and I'm not really into using such a small caliber on creatures like this and this is exactly why. I hear a lot of people say it's all about shot placement. Well, this was a perfectly placed shot and this hog walked it off *without a heart*. A smaller caliber like .223 similarly placed may have produced only a lingering wound. Feral hogs are tough, and my #1 rule for gunfighting or hunting is 'bring enough gun'. Head shots are fine for the range, but not when I'm hunting, it's far too easy to inhumanely wound the animal. The ranch owner showed me a hog from the last group- someone tried a head shot and ended up blowing the lower jaw off the pig. Your standards and ethics may vary.
Third hog: Shot by the wife with her .308 using 180gr Barnes TSX. Hog ran about 10 yards, fell down a hill and died within 30 seconds. Bullet was a through and through so we didn't get to recover the bullet and see how well the expansion was.
Fourth hog: Shot by me with compound bow. I was using Swhacker broadheads for the first time, shot a sow at about 25 yards. Arrow went in with just a grunt from the sow, she walked around a little bit, swayed for a minute and fell over like an AT-AT at the Battle of Hoth. Very different from being shot with a rifle. Looking at the arrow, I saw that one of the blades on the Swhacker didn't deploy. A little disappointed at that, but a dead pig is a dead pig.
Fifth hog: Wife changes over to her crossbow. She's shooting Swhackers too. Bolt passes through the front of the chest without the blades deploying. I end up having to track this hog and putting it down myself using my rifle as I was not confident that our Swhackers were working properly. Definitely not impressed with Swhacker's performance.
Sixth hog: Wife shoots another with her crossbow, this one dies after running 50 yards. Again, dead is dead, but we weren't able to see how the broadhead performed. The bolt broke inside the hog and it looked like the blades didn't deploy again, the wife just managed to pierce an artery with the ferrule.
Seventh hog: this was an unusual hog. He was very, very aggressive and had charged the ranch owner and my wife a couple of times. He was reddish and spotty, and the wife really wanted to drop him mainly because she was angry that it had charged at her. He was pretty good at finding hiding spots, but bad at observation or he was just overconfident because he wouldn't bolt unless you were right on top of him, and he'd try to get a couple of bites in before running off. He had run past the wife 3 times but the sun was in her scope, ran past where I was with my bow and walked within 2 yards of me, and laid down within a yard of my wife but neither of us could shoot. I spent 2 days stalking this pig, we finally managed to catch him bedded down in a place where I could take a shot at him, a 2x3 foot window through the brush was all I had. I spent a few minutes glassing him trying to figure out which direction his head was in and what part of his body was being presented to shoot at. Took a shot freehand at about 20 yards with the 300 WSM, the round punctured both lungs and severed his spine. First hog I've shot that was DRT.
Fun 3 days, but plagued with hog toughness and mechanical broadheads failing to work properly. That's weird because Swhackers have a pretty good reputation. I'd be willing to say that either me or the wife were not using them right, but when BOTH of us are having the same problems, then I tend to think it may be the broadheads.
If you're going hog hunting, bring enough gun. Hogs are tough, and don't know when they should be dead.
Just completed a 3 day hog hunt in Texas with Mrs.11B. Between the two of us, we put down 1046 pounds of hog on the hoof, all of which are going to a local meat processor and then shipped back to 11B Manor. That is 7 hogs, the smallest was 120 pounds and the largest was 185.
This hunt was full of some weirdness that I haven't seen in previous hunts before, and I figured I'll pass on some observations while I'm at it in case anyone else is planning to go hoggin' soon.
First night, shot at 2 hogs: 1 at 50 yards at a rather steep angle, another at 150 yards. I was shooting my 300 WSM, pushing 220gr Nosler Partitions. I was doing some field tests as I intend to using them for an upcoming bear hunt.
First hog: no blood trail. None at all. Figured I had missed due to improperly factoring in the angle (I was 20 feet above him and 50 yards out).
Second hog: No blood trail.
Spend 30 minutes each trying to track the hogs. By this point, I figure something's wrong my my zero. It's dark, and the ranch owner decides to take a look around. We're 30 yards into some nasty, dense Texas undergrowth when I smell that unmistakable odor of hog. And not 10 yards from me, is the first one I shot at. Zero blood trail, almost pure luck we found it.
Look around some more and find some blood near where I shot the second hog, we start following it. More and more blood, soon it looks like he was gushing blood like a fountain, but he kept on going. Eventually, crawling on hands and knees under bushes, 150 yards from where he was shot, we finally found him.
The first hog was shot pretty much standard boiler room, both lungs gone and part of the liver. Decent exit wound but surprisingly little blood.
Second one: shot through the heart. Completely gone, pulped, liquified, destroyed. Dark red goo where the ticker was. This hog took a 220gr Partition from a 300 WSM and ran 150 yards before dying. Now, this reinforces mine and the ranch owner's opinion on the use of .223 to hunt hog. He doesn't allow it, and I'm not really into using such a small caliber on creatures like this and this is exactly why. I hear a lot of people say it's all about shot placement. Well, this was a perfectly placed shot and this hog walked it off *without a heart*. A smaller caliber like .223 similarly placed may have produced only a lingering wound. Feral hogs are tough, and my #1 rule for gunfighting or hunting is 'bring enough gun'. Head shots are fine for the range, but not when I'm hunting, it's far too easy to inhumanely wound the animal. The ranch owner showed me a hog from the last group- someone tried a head shot and ended up blowing the lower jaw off the pig. Your standards and ethics may vary.
Third hog: Shot by the wife with her .308 using 180gr Barnes TSX. Hog ran about 10 yards, fell down a hill and died within 30 seconds. Bullet was a through and through so we didn't get to recover the bullet and see how well the expansion was.
Fourth hog: Shot by me with compound bow. I was using Swhacker broadheads for the first time, shot a sow at about 25 yards. Arrow went in with just a grunt from the sow, she walked around a little bit, swayed for a minute and fell over like an AT-AT at the Battle of Hoth. Very different from being shot with a rifle. Looking at the arrow, I saw that one of the blades on the Swhacker didn't deploy. A little disappointed at that, but a dead pig is a dead pig.
Fifth hog: Wife changes over to her crossbow. She's shooting Swhackers too. Bolt passes through the front of the chest without the blades deploying. I end up having to track this hog and putting it down myself using my rifle as I was not confident that our Swhackers were working properly. Definitely not impressed with Swhacker's performance.
Sixth hog: Wife shoots another with her crossbow, this one dies after running 50 yards. Again, dead is dead, but we weren't able to see how the broadhead performed. The bolt broke inside the hog and it looked like the blades didn't deploy again, the wife just managed to pierce an artery with the ferrule.
Seventh hog: this was an unusual hog. He was very, very aggressive and had charged the ranch owner and my wife a couple of times. He was reddish and spotty, and the wife really wanted to drop him mainly because she was angry that it had charged at her. He was pretty good at finding hiding spots, but bad at observation or he was just overconfident because he wouldn't bolt unless you were right on top of him, and he'd try to get a couple of bites in before running off. He had run past the wife 3 times but the sun was in her scope, ran past where I was with my bow and walked within 2 yards of me, and laid down within a yard of my wife but neither of us could shoot. I spent 2 days stalking this pig, we finally managed to catch him bedded down in a place where I could take a shot at him, a 2x3 foot window through the brush was all I had. I spent a few minutes glassing him trying to figure out which direction his head was in and what part of his body was being presented to shoot at. Took a shot freehand at about 20 yards with the 300 WSM, the round punctured both lungs and severed his spine. First hog I've shot that was DRT.
Fun 3 days, but plagued with hog toughness and mechanical broadheads failing to work properly. That's weird because Swhackers have a pretty good reputation. I'd be willing to say that either me or the wife were not using them right, but when BOTH of us are having the same problems, then I tend to think it may be the broadheads.
If you're going hog hunting, bring enough gun. Hogs are tough, and don't know when they should be dead.
