Hunting in Africa
Preparations
The most beautiful time of a project or during organizing a trip is the preparation. And also the most important think of preparation is to get the right stuff. Since 15 years I’m hunter in the European Alps. And for the fitness point of view I’m in a good starting position. Only once in my life I went for a Hunt in Poland for Roe deer. During the hunting season in our mountains I got a lot of experiences. But the main difference between the mountains and Africa is for sure the high temperature, dust and dry and the roughness of the country. And don’t forget the tough of the African animals! All the professional hunters recommend rifles with cartridges of 30-06. The most of the PH recommend the caliber .375 Holland & Holland Magnum.
My preferred cartridge is always our old cartridge 10.3x60R. I’m hunting Roe deer’s, mountain chamois, red stags and ibex. This cartridge was developed in the late 1880 from the old British cartridge .450/400 2 3/8" Nitro Express. The muzzle velocity was around 685 m/s, which means 2240 fps. The muzzle energy was approx. 3846 joules.
Because I’m reloader as well I do my cartridges myself. The bullets
I’m using are those from Blaser semi-jacketed
and they have a weight of 265 grains. The ballistic coefficient is about 0.280.
For reloading the cartridges I’m only using the brass of Blaser. The
powder of Rottweil has the number R903 and the primers are from RWS R5333
Magnums. The OAL of the cartridge is 77.5 mm. My loads have a muzzle
velocity of approx. 735 m/s that means 2412 fps and the muzzle energy is 4450 joules. At the distance of 100 meters it has energy of
3331 joules.
The accuracy of my loads are extremely good – I always get 20 mm groups
size with five shots from a bench rest at 100 meters! A very good accuracy
for this caliber!
The next steps would be to reload at least 120 cartridges. For Namibia it was intended to take 60 with me. And with the rest I did a lot of practice! At the end of April 2002 the booking reservations were made. Our trip has started on 2nd of July 2002 and we came back on 22nd of July 2002. We hunted exactly fourteen days in two different hunting farms. The rest of the vacations we got a hired car and we drove around the northern part of Namibia.
Mokuti-Lodge in the Etosha National Park
Conception & Realization: Collani Interactive