long live the savage 99
i was reading along with what you guys were saying about the 300 savage vs 7mm mag. I have hunted deer in Texas all my life across several counties in the river bottoms of central/east Texas and in the mesquite regions of the southern and western part of the state, and I have experimented with several popular calibers during my 30+ years of deer hunting. I have owned and hunted with both of these calibers, and I hill be happy to share my experiences with both. I started out hunting deer in the Navasota river valley in the late 1970's. We were poor and all I had to hunt with was a stevens 4-10 that i shot slugs in,but it worked. Later my a family friend loaned me a mauser rifle that had been converted to 22-250. i was still in my teens, but a good shot and learned to kill effectively with this scoped rifle, although i found it to be lite in the boots.Later i recieved a remington model 788 in 243 as a christmas gift. I wish I could honestly say how many deer i killed with this rifle, i found it much more effective than the 22-250. most likely because i used 100 grain bullets in the 243 as opposed to 55's in the 22-250.I later purchased a 30/30 in a marlin 336, a gun that i still hold in very high reguard. I found the 30/30 to have lots more knock-down power than both the 243 and the 22-250. In the early 1990's we started leasing land to hunt on in south texas , so I wanted something with more rangeso I bought a remington 700 in 270 win. This gun and caliber had served my father well as an avid deer hunter for many years, and I had personally seen him take several bucks at distances i'm sure were farther than 400 yards. In the brush country of crocket county, the 270 worked well. Around this time, i began handloading, and got started in benchrest shooting. I tried out several calibers over the next few years; 30-06springfield,308win,7mm-08win,and 25-06. the 708 and 308 were calibers i'd seen used in the benchrest world and knew them both to be contenters in the 500meter sillouette. As deer rifles they were both very effective even at distances out to 4 or 5 hundred yards with handloads and some decent glass.The worst of the lot was the 25-06. Now I know this is going to raise some eyebrows out there, as i am well informed of the following thin caliber has in Texas, but I have to be honest about my own experiences. This is the most finikey caliber I have ever tried to handload for. The caliber performs well on paper when you look at the ballistics but for me the stats just didn't carry over to the range. I never was able to make that gun shoot more than an 1 1/2 group at 200 yards. I was so disappointed with the rifle that I sold it at a gun show because i didn't want it to fall into the hands of another hunter i might know. Years later i got the idea to buy a rifle that i thought would shoot effectively at great distances. Some of the places we were hunting presented 6 to 800 yard shots and i thought maybe with my benchrest experience and handloading i could possibly take a deer at these distances, with the right caliber. so after ome research i steeled on a 7mm magnum in a remington 700 0f coarse. the rifle did what i wanted it to do, but it took some expensive glass to get it done and i literally had to construct a portable take-down shooting bench to take into the field. i found the caliber to be devistatingly powerfull on the smaller sized deer of southwest Texas. Overkill is a good way to describe it. Around this time i began to get interested in classic hunting calibers, and became somewhat of a collector of these type guns. The one that performed the best was a sporteried sweedish mauser in 6.5x55. as a hunter who has used both this caliber and the 270win in the field i honestly cannot say which is better, but they are both great flat-shooters and hard hitters. absolutly everything a deer hunter could possibly want and then some. i bought two classic savage 99s one in 250 and one in 300savage. The 250 would never shoot right. I later discovered that some of the earlier guns had a slower rifling twist and thus don't perform well with some of the heavier bullets. this is the same problem with some of the earlier 6mm remingtons as well. The 300 savage was great fun. I wouldn't put a scope on it, as it would ruin the gun's value, but i would love to try one with a scope. on paper the gun ballisticly is not that far removed from a 308, and we all know what that caliber is capable of,right? Ive told alot of my story here, but the point im trying to make is this: the rifle and caliber used should always be in direct perportion the the game persued and the possible shot to be presented. There is a reason why there are so many calibers available out there, and that is because they all have theyre place . It's just that bigger isn't always better, at least not for deer. A young hunter once asked me what I thought was the best caliber for deer, I pondered the question awhile as he admired my custom-built 7mm08 with west-german Ziess, then i told him this: any modern rifle caliber that shoots at least a 100-grain bullet with a muzzle velosity of around 2800fps. You have alot to choose from.
