Moving deer: peep or blade sight?

There she blows!

I went out with some whale hunters, just outside Iqaluit Nunavut a few years ago. Whale hunting is a great test of shooting skills. The beast only appears for a few seconds and you must get the shot off instantly. The Inuit unanimously prefer blade sites to peeps or scopes. In fact, to them, the ideal whale rifle is an 8 MM German Mauser, a Swedish Mauser or a Mosin Nagant carbine.

The speed and accuracy of these shooters would have to be seen to be believed. Even if you happened to be watching the very spot where the whale surfaced (very unlikely), you have only a few seconds to get the round off. From what I saw, there were very few misses on a moving target, where only a small portion of it is above the waves. In a group of around 15 boats, nobody had peeps. The local gunsmith said that for whale hunting, Inuit would not purchase a Lee Enfield Mk 4 with peep sites, because it was considered too slow to hit a small moving target, available for perhaps three seconds.

B
 
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I would say hunting whales this way would compare well to the 'snipe' hunts that gave rise to the term 'sniper'. I believe that besides having an extremely small window of opportunity it is also important to wait/make sure the whale has filled it's lungs before shooting, or else face the risk of having the whale sink. Gives game recovery a whole new dimension.
 
For a peep to work it's best your eye should be as close as possible to the peep. The Williams with the apperture screwed out (and thrown away as my uncles did) is a leap of faith and it WILL work for you. Forget about SEEING the ghost ring you should only see the front bead with a GHOST or shadowey circle around it. Shooters new to peeps often try to centre the bead in the aperture. That is what causes the problems. Look THROUGH the the peep at the post or bead and place that on the deer. Bang dead deer. It's not science it's just trust.

cheers Darryl
 
madtrapper143 said:
For a peep to work it's best your eye should be as close as possible to the peep. The Williams with the apperture screwed out (and thrown away as my uncles did) is a leap of faith and it WILL work for you. Forget about SEEING the ghost ring you should only see the front bead with a GHOST or shadowey circle around it. Shooters new to peeps often try to centre the bead in the aperture. That is what causes the problems. Look THROUGH the the peep at the post or bead and place that on the deer. Bang dead deer. It's not science it's just trust.

cheers Darryl
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This is exactly wwhy many people cannot shoot a peep sight properly - only becauase the don't realize HOW to shoot with a rear aperature sight!
This topic has been beat to death eveery fall, but bears repeating .
DO NOT LOOK AT THE APERATURE!!:D
you look THROUGH IT.
it should be nothing more than fuzzy!
If you see it in any way , shape or form, your eye is focusing on it for a split second, and this is wrong.

Funny thing is about these posts, somebody asks about using it=rons sights others chime inabout low power scopes, open sights, etc.
IRONS RULE!! ( as loong a they are used properly!):D
Egverybody have a great day , go forth and shoot something !
Cat
 
One more thing, for those used to scopes, forget eye relief!
Crawl up on the stock and get close to that rear peep. Get a wide, wide field of view, (Far wider than a typical scope) and let your eyeball center itself in the sight.
 
ninepointer said:
I was shooting my Ruger 10/22 (equipped with Williams receiver sight) this past weekend and I tried the ghost ring method. It worked fine in the daylight but when I got into shady woods I really had trouble seeing the ghost ring. The ghost became invisible.

One thing I noticed was that if I moved my head back a bit from my natural postion, the ghost ring re-appeared. I'm a tall guy and the 10/22 carbine has a fairly short stock, so this got me wondering; could it be that my eye is too close to the receiver sight? I'm thinking of buying a pad to extend the stock, but first I'd like to hear if anyone else has encountered this problem?
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Read above replys carefully, you do not attempt to look at the ghost ring!
The peep should be as close to the eye as possible, that's why most early peeps were TANG peeps.

Bigbill, if the indians had tried using a proper peep, not the Enfield one with a very thick ring that severly limits your field of view they would have had much better success, but then when you limit your $$ spend on your gun I can see
they may have the best from what they had to choose from:rolleyes:
 
ninepointer;

Love your sig line. I would love to deer hunt with hounds someday. I live fairly close, within a km., of a Hunt Club that hunts fox and coyote with hounds, I get to wake up by the hounds baying every morning. Have followed the hunt in my vehicle a couple of times, and it sure is exciting when the hounds pick up a scent.

7.62mm
 
7.62mm:.The exitement of hound hunting is something you could never explain to some-one that has never tried it! I know!! I was one that couldn't understand it & thought it was unsporting & unfair till I was invited to a camp that ran that way.....many yrs ago!
 
Once somebody has hunted deer with hounds, they understand that "unsporting" is a myth. In all honesty, most of the deer shot by our camp are not the ones being directly chased by a hound, they are the other deer that are sneaking away from all the commotion. For camps that hunt using deer drives, the biggest benefit to including hounds in the hunt is the additional ground that is covered by the hounds and the ability of the hounds to flush deer out of some of the places that a driver (dogger) might not enter. I'm getting excited just thinking about it!:)
 
Out of curiosity, I e-mailed the Benoit brothers to ask how they used the peep sights on their Remington 760's. I received a response from Shane Benoit today, who said that they used the aperture insert to sight-in, but then removed it for hunting. He added that they also painted the ghost ring and the front bead with orange paint.

I didn't ask if they still used peeps, but judging from the photos on their website, they use Trijicon scopes now.

Ninepointer
 
Bigbill said:
I went out with some whale hunters, just outside Iqaluit Nunavut a few years ago. Whale hunting is a great test of shooting skills. The beast only appears for a few seconds and you must get the shot off instantly. The Inuit unanimously prefer blade sites to peeps or scopes. In fact, to them, the ideal whale rifle is an 8 MM German Mauser, a Swedish Mauser or a Mosin Nagant carbine.
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Well if you can convince any of those Inuits to part with a couple of those Valmets they are rumored to have been provided, I have a couple of Nagants, and I can even throw in a bubbaed Swede mauser in the mix in exchange for some of them .... :pirate: (somebody had to ask :D)
 
Hunting with peep sights can be a bit trying. Inserts are fine only in good light conditions. In low light, or when hunting in heavy cover, removing the insert will make target acquistion easier for you. This fall I shot a spike at 87 meters in low light. The swedish mauser with peep insert removed proved quite effective.
 
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