All,
My wife use to use a 243, which all though she never lost a deer with that cartridge, she did have some close calls. What I mean by this is for example, she once shot a buck who was trotting through, about 100 yards away. She did not wait for the buck to stop and She shot and swore she hit the deer. I found exactly where the deer was walking (the ground had a light covering of snow) and could not find one drop of blood in a 30 yard circle around where the deer was shot. I then asked her where it ran. We trailed about 75 yards until we hit a patch of ground where there was no more snow and could no longer see where the deer was going. Again, still no blood so now I'm thinking it was a clean miss. My nephew was walking down the hill towards us and points at a bush about 10 yards away from me and says " there is your buck". The buck literally died in the middle of this bush and all you could see was one leg sticking out. Had my nephew not seen it, we would have left thinking she missed the deer. Turns out the hit was a good hit in the lungs. A touch high but still well within the lung kill zone and was double lunged. The bullet did not exit and the entrance hole (being a 243 size) barely had a drop of blood coming out of it. I personally am a proponent of 2 holes is better than 1 and the larger the caliber (within reason) the better BUT that being said, we decided to step up to a 7mm08. She has killed a few deer since with that rifle and the performance has been amazing. Mostly drt and almost all with exits. That is where the story goes bad again. Last year, she had a deer come on her off side so she decided to try shooting at it lefty out of a treestand. Needless to say, she did not have a proper grip and she was scoped...ended up fracturing her nose. Now she has become a touch recoil shy due to this. I had her shooting all summer and she seems to be ok BUT we have transitioned her to custom handloads which are on the lower end of 7mm08 recoil using 120 grain bullets and varget powder. She is near the bottom end of the load value for varget and this leads to a very low recoil load but the bullet still performs excellent on deer, so far. She has 2 deer under her belt this year. Both exits with nice holes and the deer did not go far. So here is the deal, she has a backup savage lady hunter which I'm about to rebarrel since it shoots terrible. I am thinking instead of rebarreling to 7mm08, to instead have it barreled for 6.5creedmoor for several reasons. One, it is still a very low recoiling round and a 120 grain bullet out of that would have a bit better ballistics than a 120 out of a 7mm08 although she does not shoot extreme long range anyway so it does not really matter I guess. Two, 6.5creedmoor is a cool round and ive personally wanted to add one to the stable. Three, our child could someday start out hunting with that instead of a 243. My fear about going to 6.5cm though is that I don't want to be back to where we were with the 243 where some shots were debatable with whitetails. Is the 6.5 a really effective whitetail round OR is it just marginal like the 243? Again, this is her backup rifle. Her primary is the 7mm08 (she loves that rifle). This rifle will only be used occasionally unless she ends up loving it for some reason. Thanks.