With this season now officially over for me it's back to the patterning board. This season I noted what worked and what didn't for me and my friends. I did a lot of patterning with my guns and my buddies to see what worked best in our guns but the field results are what's its really all about.
For teal season I loaded up some lightning steel 2,recipe 5. I loaded them in both 4 and 5's. What I found was although both were effective the 5's were often found in the meat and not passing through even these little birds. So 5's are now off the list and 4 is the smallest I'll load.
This year I really liked rsi 75 with 3's for my all around general load. I loaded up 2 cases in 1's for my buddy to use on snows and he loved them on birds over the decoys and anything inside 45 yards after that the amount of clean kills dropped off. I loaded a case of BB's for my uncle to use on snows and he had no issues taking birds beyond the 40 yard mark with a mod choke.
When I was hunting open water,late season,high wind birds I used a cheddite,lbc 1 1/4 oz load of 1's. I also used that load with 1's and B's on snows and it was just as effective. This load really hammered birds and will be another that will be in the lineup.
I really liked rsi 74 loaded with BB for long range snows. I'm going to look at what other 547 grain BB loads I can make up that will hold together this summer. I want to look into csd and lbc loads. I loaded a BPI recipe for lbc,fed paper base,547 gr load in a 3" black cloud hull,which has a little more volume than the regular fed paper base hull. They ran an average of 1420 fps but patterned right at 90% at 40 yards. That's a good pattern I was just hoping for a little more speed but that load should be fine for snows laoded with BB. I didn't field test that one this year but I will next spring.