Pre-Season Workouts

It's just about all I can think about--trail-cam photos, late-evening glassing sessions, hanging stands and cutting shooting lanes, velvet-covered antlers filling the mind--fall is on the way and right behind it deer season.

In my home state of Georgia, the week-long special season gives me a crack at bucks before the modern firearms seasons starts, and in states like Iowa, muzzleloaders will be the only crack I get at all. Proficiency with my muzzleloader, obviously, is a prerequisite to a successful season. But many of us cram this most important component into one frenetic afternoon of shooting, loading, adjusting, swabbing, cussing and cleaning. If you're going to take the one-shot challenge, it pays to make sure that one shot will count.

A couple of months before opening day, before the sun crawls into the sky and sends temperatures into unbearable territory, I head to the range with a box of propellant and primers, a few different bullets and a handful of targets. While I have a go-to bullet/propellant/primer combination for just about every rifle I own, it pays to experiment a little with the latest and greatest new products introduced during the last year. Five three-shot groups at 100 yards will give you a pretty good idea of a load's accuracy potential and may help you shave a half-inch off your favorite rifle's group size. It helps to save last year's targets or keep notes on each rifle so you have something other than your failing memory on which to rely.

This range time allows you to squeeze every possible quarter-inch of accuracy from a rifle, but, more important, it reacquaints you with things like the trigger pull, a safety or safeties and the rifle's general feel.

One of the more important aspects of muzzleloader accuracy is how consistently you load the rifle, keeping the number of patches between shots the same or the amount of force with which you seat the bullet the same for each shot. Much of it is based on feel, and repetition will help you carry over good habits from the range to the field.

I will usually end up hunting with four or five different rifles during the course of a season, and honestly, I have a hard time remembering which bullet, with what powder charge, hits where at what range. The multiple range sessions are an invaluable chance to gather make-or-break data on each rifle. Occasionally, I even use different bullets and charge weights in the same gun on the same hunt. On a recent mountain goat/black bear hunt in British Columbia, I carried just one .50-caliber CVA Kodiak Pro rifle but used a 338-grain Powerbelt Platinum bullet over 100 grains of Triple Seven for bears and swapped to a 300-grain Powerbelt Platinum over 150 grains of Triple Seven for goats. I had a little cheat sheet with both flight paths that stayed in my pack, since there was obviously quite a bit of difference in trajectory between the two. While most whitetail hunts rarely get this complicated, it's nice to have a handy reference available.

After sending the first two dozen or so shots downrange from a bench, I move off the bench for some of the most important practice before the season's start. My shooting club has a range without benches that allows shooters to do whatever they want in the way of practice, just so it remains inside the bounds of gun safety.