Thread: First blood and a proper trophy sized Billy

Good thread this, @dannyb, good to see some attention being paid to some of the best sport shooting you can have in NZ, and also of course necessary pest control on the farms.

We’ve put a lot of effort into goats at between 300-700m in the last 3 years. The switch to manuka honey means the scrub is a lot more valuable than it used to be... so now there’s more of a focus on goats. The geography means effective control needs to work well across the deep valleys, with the wind blowing from behind the shooter looking straight across. You pick the valley on the day based on the wind. Shooting in an arc of 60° you want to set yourself up to pick off the big nannies first, they are the #1 targets, get them first and then the billies, the rest of the mob will go round in circles.

Two guns spaced 20m apart, a spotter each doing the ranging, very effective... Dialing up and down for elevation, holding left and right slightly for wind.

So after using a .308 Win, 7mm Rem Mag and a 1:8” twist, 26” barrelled .243 Win, shooting Hornady A-Max and Nosler BTs, I’ve finally settled on the 6.5 Creedmoor with a 24” varmint contour barrel and 143gr ELD-X.

Bugger all recoil, cool barrel after a 5 shot string, and deadly accurate, it just slays the goaty pestilence. The 1:8” .243 would be my next pick with the 105gr A-Max, also wickedly accurate out to 450m -ish but a little prone to wandering in the breeze after that. The other two were no contest terminals wise, but they were just that little bit too hard kicking to keep up a fast rate of fire, to stay on the mob as they move across you. An afternoon of 7mm RM is hard work on the shoulder, shooting prone, in rough country. The low recoil of the heavy (13lbs) Creedmoor rig just works.

Past ~600m then the wind calls start to get real tricky, little errors make for clean misses or worse crying goats which is not nice. Your spotter must know their stuff for sure. So we looked at the ballistics of the 6.5mm ELD-X and put a limit of 700m absolute max for goats, assuming the wind is directly behind. In practice, with the geography as it is, we rarely go past 600m on goats, most will be taken between 300 and 500m. But man that ELD-X flies well eh, and nothing ever gets up once they’ve been whacked.

This is a typical face on a neighboring property, the top of the ridgeline is 550m, the bottom of the gully is 400m. Fifteen goats died on that face in less than 6 minutes, the DPT was mighty warm but the heavy barrel stayed true. It earns a lot of cred points with the neighbours, knocking over goats, when it comes round to discussing that beaut 14 pointer red stag you’ve been watching go backwards and forwards over the boundary fence!