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Connor

Hi all, this is my first post here as I have just found this site. I am 22 and have been a keen stalker/rifle shot here in the uk since a young age. I have just completed my first serious season deer culling and as I have always been a bit anal when it comes to my shooting I have been recording my results. Around 150 of the deer that I have shot over the last few months have been shot with sako 123gr out of my semi custom bergara .308 win. I am confined to factory ammo (rules of the company that I work for) although I have home loads and different calibers that I use on occasions that I expect shots past 300m. Of the 150 deer they have been evenly split between muntjac (size of a spaniel dog) , roe, fallow, sika and red. Here are some of my findings with these bullets.
They are accurate in my rifle, shooting sub .5moa. They are advertised as having a velocity of 3018fps, in my rifle they adverage 3008fps with an ES of 20fps, not amazing but pretty good and I feel like their advertised velocity is a true to life reprosentation and isn’t designed to be deceptive.
They perform brilliantly on game sub 200m. They have adequate penetration to shoot straight through big reds yet they also open up fast and create wide fast killing wound channels on small roe and muntjac. Some people I know struggle with finding a .308 bulletin that will deal with both small roe and big reds.
They are cheap enough and common enough in the uk to be viable for high volume culling. Some of the more premium options are not.
Now the down side, they are a light low bc bullet. At the 200m mark their performance on game goes from fantastic to good, at 250m it goes from good to okay and at 300m it goes from okay to poor. I shot 3 deer past 300m with these bullets (past 300m I normally switch to 168gr amax home loads). Two were roe at about 320m that both ran 15 yards then fell over dead, however this was due to good shot placement and upon inspection the bullet had pretty much just pencilled through, if the shot placement was slightly off I have no doubt that they would have ran large distances. The 3rd deer was a fallow doe at 330m which took 10 steps then flopped over. The bullet expanded better on her and destroyed large amounts of lung which I put down to her offering more resistance to the bullet than the roe. I do like these bullets but I would definitely place a limit of 300m for effective performance on game. Will I switch to a heavier bullet? Probably, but for the shooting that I use my .308 for they offer good reliable performance and I am lucky to have a larger rifle for shots in more open areas. I hope this has been of some use to somebody and I think it shows the importance of having enough bullet weight at longer ranges.