1/23/10

Today Dad came up and went shooting with me. We stepped off a target, and set it up at what we figured was between 525 and 550 yards away. Dad stayed near the target, to mark the shots, and I walked back to the truck and set up the shot with my .243 Ruger target rifle. I was elated to find that I could use the gap between the 2nd and 3rd lines on the scope as my reference to put 4 shots all on the paper! One of the shots was 1 inch left and ½ inch low, a very good shot! The worst shot was 4 inches off center and a little over an inch high. All this was accomplished with the Burris Ballistic Plex 3-9 power scope. The ammo was factory Winchester Super X bullets, the cheapest bullets that I can buy.

Dad tried to zero his old .243 at 100 yards, but there must be something wrong with the scope because after trying to adjust it, the bullets were walking all over the place. We didn't spend much time on that.

I wanted to know exactly how far my shots really were at the target, so we used Dad's GPS for highway driving to set a waypoint at our shooting position and then we walked over to the target site. We had set the box up on a stump there. With both waypoints set up in the GPS, we went home. I downloaded the waypoints into Google Earth on the computer and used the ruler in that program to calculate the distance. I was bummed to see that the actual distance was 425 yards. Although that was a let down, because it would have been cooler to have been shooting at 500+ yards, it was very cool to see it in Google Earth.

Now I can use that stump as a reference and get some more shooting at 425 yards from that position. I can't wait to get the scope for the Savage 308 Precision rifle that I just bought. I have been trying to decide between the Viper Vortex 6-20 scope, or the SWFA Super Sniper 10 power fixed scope. Today, I placed the order for the Vortex scope only because they have a Digicert certificate on their site. We will see how that goes hopefully next week.