Burned a spot on my pvs-14 last week so I sent it in to have them try and get the spot out, so I only had my thermal monocular to navigate with last night. Since the thermal cannot see through glass I decided to bring a chair and watch this one large field scanning every few minutes with the thermal. On one of the scans I spotted a nice buck and was watching him as a sounder of hogs came out about 100 yards to his left. Game on!
They stopped and started feeding out in the open upwind from me perfect! So the stalk begins with the thermal monocular around my neck stopping to look about every 50 yards. Man it was dark with no pvs. On my last look the hogs were still 400-500 yards from me and feeding, as I raised the thermal to my eye the hogs were at a full trot right at me 75 yards and closing fast! By the time I set up the sticks turned on the w1000, and hit record the alpha sow was about 40 yards from me and she knew something was wrong. There were three adults and about six young hogs in the sounder, they all came to a stop looking my direction even though it was pitch black no moon and I was down wind with a strong breeze. The alpha sow took a few steps to the right still trying to figure out what I was, and she paid for that mistake with a 120 sst to the head she dropped DRT. Moved to the second hog, my first shot was a miss a bit high, the second hit him high at an angle with a nice blood spray but this just sent him into high gear. A third shot got a squeal out of him but he never slowed down everything after that was misses and I watched the whole group run into the trees very frustrated.
After this I went to check the scopes zero since I have switched to several different optics on the rifle lately, sure enough it was 3" left and 3" high at 50 yards. I'm surprised the hits did not break that hogs back must have just missed the spine. Later in the night with the zero fixed the hogs went down much better.
They stopped and started feeding out in the open upwind from me perfect! So the stalk begins with the thermal monocular around my neck stopping to look about every 50 yards. Man it was dark with no pvs. On my last look the hogs were still 400-500 yards from me and feeding, as I raised the thermal to my eye the hogs were at a full trot right at me 75 yards and closing fast! By the time I set up the sticks turned on the w1000, and hit record the alpha sow was about 40 yards from me and she knew something was wrong. There were three adults and about six young hogs in the sounder, they all came to a stop looking my direction even though it was pitch black no moon and I was down wind with a strong breeze. The alpha sow took a few steps to the right still trying to figure out what I was, and she paid for that mistake with a 120 sst to the head she dropped DRT. Moved to the second hog, my first shot was a miss a bit high, the second hit him high at an angle with a nice blood spray but this just sent him into high gear. A third shot got a squeal out of him but he never slowed down everything after that was misses and I watched the whole group run into the trees very frustrated.
After this I went to check the scopes zero since I have switched to several different optics on the rifle lately, sure enough it was 3" left and 3" high at 50 yards. I'm surprised the hits did not break that hogs back must have just missed the spine. Later in the night with the zero fixed the hogs went down much better.
