Please tell us more about seal hunting. from land to land? Land to water? Boat to water?
Here in Newfoundland there are two kinds of sealing.
Firstly, there is, of course, the much maligned commercial hunt. Most of this takes place at what they call the "Front", the leading edge of the ice pack off the northeastern coast. That's where the seal herds are encountered in the thousands, and most of the harvest takes place from the deck of a boat shooting at seals laying on the ice.
The smaller scale hunt, some of it commercial and some of it for personal use, takes place in the smaller bays and along the coast. On the northern parts of the island, you can sometimes walk onto the sea ice from the shore and take seals on the ice. Otherwise, you're trolling around in small boats trying to catch them on the ice or shooting at heads bobbing around in open water. The latter is especially challenging, for obvious reasons.
In recent years the ice pack hasn't advanced as far south as before, making it much tougher to hunt seals in the southern and eastern parts of the island. In some places, seals were having their pups on the shore because of a lack of ice.
Otokiak no doubt gets much better quality ice than us, but maybe even he has seen a change in the character of the ice in the last few years.
What kind of distances involved? I find myself think maybe a SKS would be about right. Cheap ammo. reliable.
Relatively short distances, 100 yd or less, especially in open water or broken ice. Further is possible if you have a larger boat and can get into a good number of them on the ice, but in that case you might not need to be making longer shots anyway.
Either way you're always looking for head shots so as not to spoil the pelt. In open water it can be like a game of "aquatic whack-a-mole", heh.
