doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com “Perfect” opinions

I’ll pay Dave the fee for your next “for sale” ad. He ain’t getting rich here, you know.

Side note, I figured if anybody here had one, it would be you.

Best,
Ted

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Lonesome ain’t afraid to hack a shotgun barrel off, so, maybe his RBL has a pair of Polys screwed into the end.
When he gets back from the golpher bake, we’ll ask him.

I really like Gene's work, but any single barrel gun should be at least improved modified, and I've never seen an original Springfield 03 sporter that was a .270. I notice that he didn't claim that a yellow retriever could climb a tree better than a Wirehair. I guess we all have our favorites, in guns, calibers, chokes, and dogs.

I like his choice of chokes it is also my favorite for most hunting.

I could live with 7s for everything from woodcock to pheasants.

Dogs is where we have a serious divergence. Labs are great retrievers, I've owned a couple, best dog I've ever shot over from shore blinds on lake Michigan. My assessment is 70 percent waterfowl and 30 percent upland an AWS is hard to beat. Switch those percentages around and small parcel upland I'd have the go with w hunting bred English cocker. All around Daht, GWHP,, my last one we hunted waterfowl along the PNW coast, next day left for Winner SD, hunted pheasant for a week and headed north for N WI for grouse and woodcock, he could switch gear with nary a bobble. Best marking retriever I've hunted over was a GSHP, we dropped seven woodies out of a flock and he retrieved six without a command, the seventh had drifted under a tree and just needed one hand signal.,

I've been blessed by wonderful hunting dogs.

Sooner, or, later, the temps in my part of the world will be at 0 degrees, or, lower, and I up my game a bit for the late season ditch parrots and the grouse that are left to 6s and 5s. I have a bunch of lead 4s left over from my dads duck and goose hunting forays, but, my guns have more open chokes then dad used, and the patterns I get with 4s seem a bit ragged. I don’t doubt if you get a #4 into just about any bird it is going to spoil his whole afternoon. I still hunt when it gets cold, I just don’t do it as long as I once did.

I’ve probably born witness to most of a dozen generations of Labs lifting their legs on somebody’s shotgun or boots. Also noted was the fact that if you were hunting with a guy who had GSPs, and you stopped for lunch, you had to retrain all the male dogs afterward. I’ve been in a duck boat with a Chesapeake who sat and snarled at me for the entire ride. I asked the owner what I did to piss him off, and was told nothing, he did that to everybody, especially women. He usually bit the women. He was an excellent retriever, but, it seemed to me it should have been possible to get that same thing in a less violent package. I haven’t shot a duck in 50 years. Not that dogs fault, but, he was part of the mix that turned me off that game.

My preference is to smaller, female Setters. The bigger dogs were fine until I hit 60, and would occasionally have to load them into the truck when they got old. If the day is warm, I don’t think too hard about shot size, especially for ruffed grouse, anywhere between 6s and 8s will do the job if I do mine. I don’t need a bunch of choke for that task, either.

I like Gene’s writing, but, my style and habits shouldn’t be identical to his. Neither should yours.

Best,
Ted

Gene made me aware of a wonderful little bottle with a white label named Angostura Bitters. For that I remember him with great fondness.