Yesterday deer hunting was a bust. Warm weather and full moon at night have combined to keep the deer bedded up during the day in spite of the incoming front.

Today, we saw the strength of that front with high gusts and spotty, heavy rain. Since it was raining too heavily to hunt this morning I went to the range. Now that is a bit of the gun loony coming out. While there, I met a local fellow, L. Carpenter who was shooting a beautiful S&W .30-06 bolt action and a Valmet 12 ga. over .30-06 which he thinks is an excellent game gun. He says he loads it with 3" buckshot for the heavy brush/close range stuff and uses the .30-06 at 40 yards and more.

Mr. Carpenter said that he had done what I had done. Go to the range early, in the rain, hoping the range would be clear. Except for myself and one other, it was.

I went to try the 8.5 gr. Unique under the 255 gr. Keith bullet .45 Colt load in my New Vaquero. It is funny, but it seems that while it groups low and to the left, it will shoot to point of aim on small targets such as cans (which I picked up). Why I'm shooting so differently on paper as compared to the other I don't know. It isn't something I've noticed myself doing before.

Anyway, the group with the 8.5 gr. load is bigger than with the 9 gr. so I'm going to try some more 9 gr. and some 8 gr. to see if there is a noticeable difference.