Becoming A Ballistics Bob

Having reluctantly experimented with a slab of heavier cartridges he was sent, Jonathan Young wonders if his lucky number’s wrong

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“GOODNESS, you haven’t become a Ballistics Bob, have you?” asked a shocked mate from the Westcountry, a man who’s seen thousands of pheasants despatched and missed. “You can’t believe the number of hours I’ve spent having the knickers bored off me by post-shoot post-mortems on shot size and loads.”

His comments followed my research on what people were using this season, prompted by a throwaway remark from a friend that he uses 32gm of No 5s all season on everything. That seemed an awful lot of metal for August grouse but it seems he’s not alone and that load is the norm for many.

Is this interesting? Well, not to the many chaps I know who take pride in having absolutely no knowledge of what they stuff up their barrels so long as it goes bang. I would admire such insouciance were it sound but I’ve seen hundreds of people load 2¾in squibs into 2½in-chambered guns and that’s far from clever. I also wonder why chaps who spend thousands on guns and shooting scrimp on the important bit: it’s akin to driving an Aston Martin on a racetrack without caring about its engine performance.

The finest cartridge in the world won’t help, of course, if it’s pointed in the wrong place: shot cannot travel backwards. But a good one, consistently loaded with the same components, does remove one uncertainty when you’ve missed a string of birds: whatever else is going wrong, it isn’t the brand of cartridge you’re using.