My first muzzleloader buck in 2025 Zone C5

[Ninering62]

On 10/24 just barely daybreak I see several dark silhouettes moving in the badly overgrown field & I grabbed my Steiner 12x Predator Pro bino’s & give them a glance. There’s a decent 8pt that I’ve been seeing.
So I grabbed my most recent TC Omega converted into a .45 1:18 McGowen barreled smokeless muzzleloader & I turned on the illuminated moa reticle & set it on my Jim Shockys trigger sticks tripod & got a bead on him.
Oh yeah, I was sitting in the recliner in the fam rm, drinkin coffee & eatin sausage gravy & biscuits at the time.
The buck was at 165yds walking & at a hard quartering away angle.
Low light, overgrown field, 165yds, walking & a really bad angle… I damn near didn’t shoot. But I’m very confident in my shooting ability & my gun, so I pulled the trigger with just 10yds before he would have made it into the woods in the corner of the field.
I am shooting a .40 195g Barnes Expander in a .45 sabot with a muzzle velocity of 2765fps, so he dropped so fast that I didn’t even see him drop & all of the other deer out there ran off in various different directions.
I reloaded & walked out to look & there he was DRT.
For whatever reason, my shot hit 4” lower than it should have & I was only 3” from missing under him.
The shot busted about half of the sternum before cutting a trench in the whole side of the heart, going through the right lung, then exiting under the right front leg.
Over the next 2 days I made a big pot of deer stew, another big pot of deer hash & I put 46lbs of deer BBQ in the freezer.

 

[Ninering62]

On 10/24 just barely daybreak I see several dark silhouettes moving in the badly overgrown field & I grabbed my Steiner 12x Predator Pro bino’s & give them a glance. There’s a decent 8pt that I’ve been seeing.
So I grabbed my most recent TC Omega converted into a .45 1:18 McGowen barreled smokeless muzzleloader & I turned on the illuminated moa reticle & set it on my Jim Shockys trigger sticks tripod & got a bead on him.
Oh yeah, I was sitting in the recliner in the fam rm, drinkin coffee & eatin sausage gravy & biscuits at the time.
The buck was at 165yds walking & at a hard quartering away angle.
Low light, overgrown field, 165yds, walking & a really bad angle… I damn near didn’t shoot. But I’m very confident in my shooting ability & my gun, so I pulled the trigger with just 10yds before he would have made it into the woods in the corner of the field.
I am shooting a .40 195g Barnes Expander in a .45 sabot with a muzzle velocity of 2765fps, so he dropped so fast that I didn’t even see him drop & all of the other deer out there ran off in various different directions.
I reloaded & walked out to look & there he was DRT.
For whatever reason, my shot hit 4” lower than it should have & I was only 3” from missing under him.
The shot busted about half of the sternum before cutting a trench in the whole side of the heart, going through the right lung, then exiting under the right front leg.
Over the next 2 days I made a big pot of deer stew, another big pot of deer hash & I put 46lbs of deer BBQ in the freezer.

Here’s the gun I used & the food I made. Those bags have 2lbs in each