A Tale Of Two Sights
A Sporting Shot? It Depends …
A ballistic computer, the Kestrel talks Bluetooth with the SIG bino.
The Garmin uses radar to gauge bullet velocities. “They all help when
you’re trying to hit at a mile,” says Royal Stukey.
“Stay the morning and shoot rocks,” said my pal. His concern for my mental health was touching. On steeps to 10,000 feet 30 roadless miles into Wyoming’s storied Thorofare drainage, I had worked six days to kill an elk. The mountains were miserly. Summer weather followed rut; migration was a month away; bulls had ghosted off to hidey holes in dark timber.
Swing And A Miss
I’d been allowed one chance. “You blew up a limb,” observed my guide from behind his bino, with more exasperation than sympathy. He was tired too. And no doubt peeved he’d drawn the client insisting on open sights. At 165 yards, they hadn’t shown me the limb.
At week’s end, trudging the last miles to trailhead, I was in a funk.
“There’s no closed season on rocks,” said Royal Stukey. “No preference points, licensing or bag limit. You don’t have to walk there or back. You can even use my rifle. It’ll cheer you up.”
Prerequisite: Forget the fetching New England Custom Gun sights on my walnut-stocked .338 Mark X Mauser. Stukey’s therapy would put me behind a futuristic Sterling Precision rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor, with a Nightforce NXS 5.5-22×50 optic. “You won’t need reading lenses and a squint to aim,” he promised, as we bumped along on his side-by-side in dawn’s chill. “That scope has 100 minutes of elevation change. You’ll need ’em all.”
Far from sights and sounds of foothill farms, we wormed our way over ravines and up steeps that under rain would become grease. There had been no rain here for weeks.
On a shale bench we unloaded the rifles, an 85mm 22x Vortex Razor HD spotting scope, a packing blanket for a shooting mat. Royal’s shooting bag disgorged a Garmin chronograph and a Kestrel ballistic computer that “talks Bluetooth to my SIG binocular” — a bewildering array of hardware to someone freshly rinsed of trail dust from country hunted by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt with iron-sighted Winchesters.
Royal punched the Kestrel’s buttons and the pocket-size device yielded wind direction and speed, temperature and barometric pressure, also the direction and vertical angle to a raccoon-size rock on a ridge 200 yards off. “You can start there.”
I unsheathed my .308, a Boundary lightweight bolt rifle from Springfield Armory. It had proven accurate and pleasant to fire on my range. Over sandbags prone, through its Leupold VX-6HD 3-18×44, the rock looked pretty vulnerable. My first bullet blew shards from point of aim.
How much distance do you want? This country tests the limits of any rifle, load or shooter!
Easy Peasy
“Child’s play,” muttered Royal, who mercifully spares cobbles that close. He directed me to a smaller rock at 300 yards. I dialed elevation, shaded for slight breeze. Another hit.
We paused briefly as the Kestrel chewed through numbers that mattered at 700 yards: My bullet’s ballistic coefficient, muzzle velocity from the Garmin, rising ambient temperature under morning’s sun. The rifle settled. Bang! Not quite enough windage.
At 1,000 yards I ran the elevation dial to its stop, just shy of the required lift. I’d have to shade the rest. Stukey smiled. “You need a scope with a MOA reticle. As on my rifle and in this spotting scope. We’re not even to 1,300 yards, and already you gotta guess.” He shook his head.
Bullet strikes at 1,000 showed not just the increasing influence of gravity, drag and wind, but my inability to precisely adjust for them. “Your turn,” I said.
My pal consulted the Kestrel again, noting minute atmospheric shifts. His 6.5 in hand, he spun the Nightforce’s elevation dial a couple of revolutions, then uncoiled his lanky frame on the blanket beside the bags. He snapped open a box of handloads: fresh Lapua brass with 140-grain Berger Hybrid Target bullets stoked to 2,645fps. As I nudged the spotting scope’s reticle to the 1,000-yard rock and called the mirage as I saw it, he settled onto the Sterling’s adjustable comb. We talked through the ripples as they boiled, then reversed, aware that we saw the most visible currents, not necessarily the most influential. At last the shifts gave way to a relaxed flow. A long second after the report, dust flew from the stone’s middle. “Good shot!” I yelped, duly impressed.
Pestering rocks at 1,300 yards with the 6.5, we leaned on the Kestrel’s data, minding too the rifle’s natural point of aim and a scope-side bubble level. The Garmin showed velocities were remarkably consistent. “Details matter out yonder,” said Royal. Even at 22x, basketball-size rocks 1,300 yards off appear small. Each spans less than 1 MOA.
Stukey lasered the next geologic victim at 1,690 yards, not quite a mile. Dialing his scope to its zenith, he added 9 minutes using the reticle’s 1-minute hash marks. The wind was taking a nap. I kept my eye to the spotting scope after the blast — those bullets were aloft for 3.2 seconds! Descending steeply, his first booted dust from the rock face little more than a hand’s width to 5 o’clock. He turned and grinned. “Kinda fun!”
At the bench, NEGC’s open sights on a Shilen-barreled
Mauser in .338 gave Wayne this group — but it was
not good enough in Wyoming!
Leaning Occurs
And instructive. To land bullets consistently near small targets that far off, you not only need an accurate rifle and ammunition, but high-magnification glass and MOA (or MIL) reticles in both riflescope and spotting scope. A partner who can intelligently call conditions and strikes is a big help. Stukey is sold on his Kestrel too. “It’s a ballistic brain. It quickly marries relevant ammo data to atmospheric conditions. You get scope settings that bring the bullet’s arc on target. Without it, you’d be guessing, and firing a lot of expensive loads to walk bullets in.”
Royal, I learned long ago, is a perfectionist. His shooting benches, and now his adjustable rifle rests, evidence painstaking engineering and top-level machining skills. Inexpensive they’re not. But Stukey’s standards don’t brook compromise. Sandbags on a card table can give your .30-30 a zero for the deer woods. But smacking 1-MOA targets at four-figure yardage begs attention to small details in equipment and in technique.
No, making gravel from stones at 1,690 steps is not a spiritual event. It won’t cheer every hunter whose last important bullet missed a beast as big as a bathtub at 165 yards. But after three hours on that shale bench, and fewer than 20 shots, we were both smiling.
