Prior to the elephant hunt http://forums.accuratereloadin...6321043/m/4701056172 , I hunted with a group of friends for Plainsgame. It was a friends big birthday! And he very kindly had invited a group of old friends to join him on a plainsgame hunt to celebrate with him.

We have all known each other forever, it was a lot of laughs and fun. As we have all hunted Namibia several times, the objective was mostly to have fun and to hunt some cull animals and if anything really big presented itself them it was up to each one to decide what they wanted to do! Bringing back just 1 or 2 trophies is never worth it given the cost of freight, importing etc. spread out over a single animal v/s a good bag of trophies! So in the end I believe we just plan to bring back a couple of zebra and ostrich skins.

The drought in Namibia has been bad so do your research before you book a hunt as some outfits have been pretty badly hit and have had huge die offs of game or have culled a lot of game because of this. As we were not hunting Trophy plains game this situation did not really effect our safari much, but had we been, it would have been a whole different story!

I had taken my Merkel Helix in 300 win mag, with handloaded 180 grain Swift Scirroco bullets. The performance of the Scirroco was superb and most animals when properly hit dropped in their tracks. All the other hunters opted to use camp rifles in 308 and 30-06 calibers. I think a lot of the ammo used from these guns was plain old Winchester 150 grain ammo and they did the job. So as much as we like premium bullets. The regular ammo does the job without the big fanfare so long as bullet placement is good. There were a few issues with the loaner guns and I think the lesson to take away from this was that hiring guns is fine, but if you have your own rifle take it especially if you are going to shoot 200 yards+, its worth the hassle.

We all used the GUNSTIX shooting sticks and took several shots at 250 to 350 yards. The longest shot was on a Ostrich at 404 lasered yards which speaks to the steady rest from the quad legged shooting sticks, which IMO is way better than any 3 legged sticks anyday. More information on these sticks can be got at www.gunstix.com

The lodges, hospitality and cuisine in Namibia is of a very high standard and Namibia is really a great destination to hunt plainsgame.



My sister in law with her first ever African animal. She is hooked!


We shot some grouse on a few occassions, the biggest bag was around 30 birds for two guns


A really nice stalk in the wide open grass plains ended with a nice trophy Zebra





An ostrich I shot at 165 yards





Springbok at 398 yards


Thanksgiving Ostrich for dinner! I looked hard for the wish bone thinking it would be a nice little trophy
but came to find out that Ostrich dont have one. Or did I not find it


Taken at 404 yards


This Oryx was shot with a 9.3, the shot is slightly high and it ran 200 yards before dropping.


Nights were very cold, it was -10 in some area just before we got there and below 0 on many nights when we were there!




While certainly not needed at 25 yards, we had the GUNSTIX along if a more steady shot presented
itself on the elephant hunt.



I shot this Oryx at around 90 yards with my 470 off the GUNSTIX shooting sticks. Who says you cant shoot plainsgame with a double.
Its really a lot of fun and gives on plenty of practice as well for the real double rifle hunts.





The wildebeest took a pounding!


We shot quite a few oryx between us!


A springbok for the pot!

Thanks for your time.

Arjun Reddy
Hunters Networks LLC
www.huntersnetworks.com
30 Ivy Hill Road
Brewster, NY 10509
Tel: +1 845 259 3628

.

Arjun, Well done and I think the GUNSTIX message comes across loud and clear!!!

Nothing beats a family / group hunt!



.

Looks like a great time,I have used my 470 on a few warties

That plucked ‘Turkey’ is awesome! Would take a while to stuff it!

Congrats and thanks for posting, Arjun! I always enjoy a little bird shooting when I am on a safari.