Hello guys, I have just found your sight and was looking through some of the discussions. It seems some of you are really into long range shooting. I run a guide service out here in South Dakota and I am proud to say that NEARLY everyone who wanted to get into the 500 Yard Club has been able to do it out here in a day or two of shooting. I witness about 100,000 shots during the typical year out here and have watched everyone from novices to 1000 yard target shooters shoot at prairie dogs. Typically, the novices do the best shooting because they have not developed as many bad habits and have not read too many articles containing some media distortion. Here are a couple things to remember about long range shooting where media distortion has misinformed some guys....1st..500 yard shots involve a lot of luck. Guys that tell you it is all skill and/or gear are blowing smoke. , and 2nd...Once you have a load that shoots nice groups, the single limiting factor in a prairie dog town is the inability to know the precise range of the target. If you think the prairie dog is 600 yards and it is 575, the idea of "one shot/one kill" is out the window. With a group of .5-1 inch at 100 yards, your group size at 575 is about 3-6 inches...With a group that size, even if you estimate the range to be 575, your chance of hitting the dog is about 1:3 due to the small target. You need to fire a round then make the correction for wind and hold over to accurately prepare yourself for the extremely long shots. The best laser rangefinders only estimate prairie dog mounds out to about 400 yards.
I hope these two clarifications of media distortion help. There are many more but I find my clients get buggered on these two the most often. I look forward to comming to this website in the future.
www.jimriverguideservice.comWillie/Owner
