EP 551. The Perfect Trigger Pull

“But think about all the time and the money and all the emotional sacrifice that we put into getting these ducks within range. And it all boils down to that perfect trigger pull. Boom. Putting him on the strap and getting him going.”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’re in the studio today. I’ve got my buddy Joel Strickland, Surviving Duck Season all over YouTube. But today we’re going to talk about the perfect trigger pull. But think about all the time and the money and all the emotional sacrifice that we put into getting these ducks within range. And it all boils down to that perfect trigger pull. Boom. Putting him on the strap and getting him going. Joel’s got a great series online. For those of you all that hadn’t seen it, we’re going to try to summarize it today. He gets deep, deep, deep down in the bushes. No sponsorship, no bias, no nothing. He went through the entire market of shotgun shells, chokes, and everything else looking for the perfect trigger pull. Joel, how the heck are you? How’s duck season going this year?

Joel Strickland: I’m doing great. It’s warm and it’s a little slower than we like for it to be so far in December here in Arkansas. It is a little better than it was last year. Last year was a tough year too. We’re just looking forward to some cold and snow up above Arkansas for us.

Ramsey Russell: Man. I’m telling you what, you nailed it. I mean, just about throughout the whole North America, it seems like duck seasons are slower than we all want it to be. It don’t matter what we’re talking about. We may get a bump on the opener, but then we just hit, all of a sudden, hit those mid-season doldrums that seem to last most all season. I’m just going to ask you, Joel, because you’ve been around a lot, is that a function of my expectations, you think, or is that just a reality of we ain’t got the ducks we used to or something?

Joel Strickland: Well, I mean, I’ve done a lot of research on the duck numbers, the harvest, the counts, and all that stuff over the last 35 or 40 years. And I think there’s no doubt, it’s unquestionable, that we have less ducks than we did, say, in 2000. It’s been a downward trend. You look at the harvest data particularly, and of course, obviously I’m in Arkansas, and so I’m in the Mississippi Flyway. I know you are as well, and so that’s kind of more of what my interest is. But the wintering grounds historically have been Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. And I think over the last probably decade, 15 years, a lot of that’s changed. We used to get ducks that would migrate all the way through Arkansas, all the way into Louisiana, and then we would enjoy the reverse migration sometimes. And I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I remember seeing flights of mallards coming out of the South.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Joel Strickland: It just doesn’t happen like it used to. And I feel like we are almost the end of the line for the biggest part of the mallard migration. That’s really what I’m most interested in, shooting greenheads.

Ramsey Russell: Everybody.

Joel Strickland: Yeah, and so I look at my friends in Louisiana. I see how they’re shooting like 10% of what they did 25 years ago, and it grieves me because I want them to do well. Because when they do well, we do well.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. We can all agree we don’t have the total number of ducks in North America that we used to have. And there’s a litany of reasons why. I mean, the drought ain’t helping. Boy, I’m going to tell you what, it gets drier and drier. We’re not producing the ducks we need to. But that’s always happened. I’m always leery. I just got back from the UK, and to listen to their game manager and biologist describe it, their country, the entire United States, is now just 100% affected by man. It’s all been a manscape, not a landscape anymore. But then you start talking to those guys, some of those guys that have been hunting longer than I have, and they shrug and say, this is as good a duck season as it’s ever been. We had good years, we had bad years. We had more ducks, we had less ducks. But it’s all the same. I mean, they can’t perceive that. They’re not wringing their hands over a lack of ducks or a bad bottle or whatever else. They just accept it as going. And they seem to be doing pretty well, and they seem a whole lot happier as duck hunters, I tell you. But, boy, I mean, there’s no denying, you know, there’s so many things we can control. There’s so many things we cannot control when it comes to migratory birds. Here’s why I asked this question. Here’s why I’m kind of doing a little side, is let’s just say that in the last 2, 3, 5, 10 years, I’m working harder to get fewer ducks in front of my gun barrel. And by gosh, when it comes down to that critical trigger pull, boom, I want to kill that duck. And I have shot lots and lots of ducks back in the day, more ducks than not, I have shot with just whatever the cheapest steel shot I could get my paws on to run it through whatever choke I felt good about, whatever gun I was shooting at the time, with no thought whatsoever. It was simple, like back in Granddaddy’s day, just whatever ammo he gave me, I put in my gun and shot. But, man, it’s like now I feel like, as much time, and time is money, and money as I commit to chasing fewer ducks on any part of the flyway, especially down here in the Deep South, it seems like I just feel like I owe it to the resource, and I owe it to myself, and I owe it to my dog to freaking go armed with every single, the best, advantages I can when it comes down to that trigger pull. Bam. You know what I’m saying. And that’s why it was so important for me to have you come on and explain. Joel, is it fair to say years of video research, you put into this project, and the shotgun series on your YouTube channel Surviving Duck Season, the shotgun series. And this wasn’t something you just did in a weekend. This was a deep dive. And I know from having talked to you and having seen your series that you kind of started with one thing in mind, but it began to evolve by necessity. It’s like it kind of opened your eyes too. Like you’re like, “Whoa, I’ve got to expand my scope of this.” How did it start? What were you looking for, and how did it evolve, this project, the shotgun series?

Joel Strickland: Yeah. So we all have this thought process that we as duck hunters have been doing it for a long time. We think we know plenty about ballistics, about what kind of shotgun and shell we need to shoot, and it’s almost like that is the least part of what we do as duck hunters, is the shotgun, ammo, and choke tube. We’re all about decoys, duck calls, and the right place, and all that stuff’s important. But at the end of the day, the trigger pull, that’s where everything becomes success or not, if you can get the ducks close enough to shoot. Right.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Joel Strickland: And so, I’ve been a duck guy for a number of years. I can’t tell you how many years of 60 days I’ve hunted every day season. I’ve always shot a 12-gauge all my life and a little bit of 20-gauge here and there, but most of the time it’s been a 12-gauge. About five or six years ago I just got tired of the kick. I started having a little bit of problems with my shoulder, and I decided I needed a new gun. I’ve had a couple of over-unders, and I never had an autoloader gun in my life. I’ve had a few pump guns. I’ve had a BPS. I mostly just shot my Remington 870. I bought that when I was, I don’t know, I was 20 years old. That’s been a long time ago now. I’ve just shot that mostly my entire life. I decided it’s time for me to get something else. I first started shooting two and three-quarter inch shells, and that helped a little bit. But I decided I’m going to buy an autoloader, and I didn’t know what to get. So I thought at that point, I’ve got a YouTube channel, guys are interested in what I think about stuff. Let me take them on the journey to find the right shotgun. So that’s really where it all started, trying to find the right shotgun for me, and then hopefully guys could see what I went through, and that maybe would help them. I’m not the kind of guy that says, “This is how it is, and I’m going to teach you something.” It’s more like, “This is what I’ve discovered. This is what I’ve learned. I want to share what works for me.” But this series has turned into a lot more than that.

“Man. I’m telling you what, you nailed it. I mean, just about throughout the whole North America, it seems like duck seasons are slower than we all want it to be. It don’t matter what we’re talking about.”

Ramsey Russell: It has. It’s really in this world right here, whether we’re talking decoys, but especially if we’re talking shotguns, chokes, and ammo cartridge combinations, there is no one-size-fits-all. It’s what works for you and your situation. My takeaway from your extended video series was I need to get out with what I’ve got, I need to buy a few chokes, and I need to buy some ammo that I like to shoot. I need to go put it on paper and really do a deeper dive. I’ve preached forever, know your pattern, take ethical shots, make clean kills. But boy, it varies. You see these threads online, “What’s the best shotgun I need?” You went one way. You went like the mad scientist way and did deep-dive research. Most guys just ask their buddies on social media, “What shotgun should I get?” And you see all these different shotgun manufacturers. Same could be said for choke, same could be said for Ammo Company, and the same could be said for shot size within the ammo company. But truly, it’s what works for you, the user. How are you going to cultivate your perfect shot? So when you did your approach, you started off looking for the best gun for Joel, but at the same time, you stumbled across all kinds of stuff that would benefit anybody.

Joel Strickland: After I got halfway into the thing, I started finding out so much stuff, things that a lot of people just never need to know. But it’s like, well, gosh, that’s pretty darn interesting, why is it called a 12-gauge? Or why is a 410 a 410? But the real stuff, I was learning. At the time, I’d been duck hunting 30 years, and I didn’t know that. If I don’t know that, and it’s my business, I’m a duck hunting guy, I manage properties, I’ve been doing this all my life, and I don’t know this, then there’s a great chance that 90% of the other guys don’t know this stuff either.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Joel Strickland: And they’re accepting what manufacturers tell them as gospel truth. A lot of times it’s the opposite, and that’s what we found. So, like I said, I started off with it being about finding a shotgun for me. Then it started becoming all these other things. I thought, “I’ll make a shotgun series, and it’s going to be three episodes.” And then after I got through the second episode, it was like, “Nah, I could do like a hundred episodes and probably not run out of stuff.”

Ramsey Russell: You told me that you started with your shotgun, a shotgun and a bunch of chokes. Where did it go from there, Joel?

Joel Strickland: Yeah. So first of all, I settled on what kind of gun I wanted to shoot. Finding the right gun that fits you, that is the right gun for your type of use, is the number one thing. Is there a best gun? No, there’s not. Find the best gun for you that fits you, that’s the most important thing about all of it. Then I decided, okay, let’s get into the weeds on the ammunition and the choke tubes. Once I found the gun for me, I got every manufacturer of aftermarket choke tubes and tested them out. We didn’t do every one of them, you’d be here forever doing that, but I think we got nine different manufacturers, all the popular ones that everybody uses. We also got multiple copies of the factory choke tubes for that shotgun. So it wasn’t just using the ones that came with the gun. I actually bought three more copies to test those. Then we got 35, I believe, different ammunition types. Not types, but different brands and materials, steel shot, bismuth, tungsten blends, and TSS. And then within that, different manufacturers of those, different lengths of cartridges, whether it be two and three-quarter, three-inch, or three and a half. We also did some sub-gauge stuff too, but mostly we did the 12-gauge. We also used different size shot. We went everywhere from BB size shot on the steel all the way up to number nine on TSS and everything in between, trying to find out what’s kind of the right combination.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Joel Strickland: So that’s where we got in the weeds, all over the place.

Ramsey Russell: Before we jump into the weeds, you all, let’s back up just a second and talk about you, the human being and the videographer and everything else. Where are you from? What’s your background?

Joel Strickland: I’ve lived in Arkansas most of my life. Started duck hunting when I was 15 years old.

Ramsey Russell: Who you started duck hunted with, Parents or relatives?

Joel Strickland: No, a buddy at school. Both my grandfathers and several of my uncles were all big hunters, but none of them really duck hunted. They were all big deer hunters. I started off deer hunting when I was a little younger. But then one day I was at school, a buddy at school was talking about going duck hunting destinations. He killed a bunch of ducks, and he knew I liked to deer hunt. He asked me if I wanted to come go on Saturday. And so sure. And it was like I got bit so hard because it was the most incredible first duck hunt you could ask for. I knew it was meant for me.

Ramsey Russell: What was that first duck hunt like? Talk about it.

Joel Strickland: Yeah. So he called me the night before and said, hey, I’m going to be by to pick you up about 7 o’clock in the morning. I’m like, okay, well, that’s after daylight. And I was living in Little Rock at the time, and we were going to drive to Stuttgart, so that’s an hour plus. So I thought, well, I thought you had to get up early. He said, yeah, we don’t have to where we hunt. I was like, okay. So he picks me up, we drive over to his dad’s duck lodge, which is at Lodge’s Corner just outside of Stuttgart. And we had breakfast. And he asked his dad, where do we need to go? He said, I think you all need to go over into the public shooting grounds, which is Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area. And this was in 1985, so it wasn’t the mess that it’s become. And so I’m 15, he’s 16. We get to basically a boat launch. But we walked in, and I borrowed a pair of waders from him and we started walking in and I realized pretty quick, where’s the decoys? He said, oh, we don’t need any decoys. Like, okay. So we walked on about 30 minutes into the woods. Guys were walking out of the woods with straps of ducks coming out and they were, hey, you young men, make sure they come in the trees before you shoot them, giving us a little friendly advice.

Ramsey Russell: Little friendly advice, It sounds like very hospitable.

Joel Strickland: It seemed like it was that way a lot for about 10 years back in that era. I remember a lot of those types of conversations. Guys were always nice and never worried about guys setting up too close to you and shooting your swing birds and all that. But when we got out to the spot where he felt like it was the right area, he was looking around. He goes, yep, this is it. And I’m like, it all looked the same to me. It was flooded woods. He said, okay, we’re going to get up against the tree and keep hugging the tree until I tell you to shoot. Don’t look up at them. When they get in here, we’ll shoot them. He said, you can only kill two. Like, okay. He said, make sure they’re both green. I said, okay. And so about 15 minutes later, some ducks started working over the top. He started kicking the water. He never blew a call one time, and the ducks started landing. Now, back then I didn’t know anything about duck hunting and anything more than five was probably a lot of ducks to me. But it seemed like there were hundreds that were landing in the water in front of us, all around us, and you could feel the wind of their wings as they landed. They were splashing around us and making all kinds of ruckus. He says, okay, shoot them. And I jumped up and shot. Bam. Bam. Twice. Two ducks fell. He shot twice. Two ducks fell. And we were on our way out of the hole, and I was like, this is incredible.

Ramsey Russell: Man. And here you are. And the rest, as they say, is history. Here you are. Man, It’s just funny how something as simple as that trigger pull can connect you for life and send you down these rabbit holes, isn’t it? Well, that’s great. When do you think times changed on Arkansas public? I had a conversation last night for another episode. He described somewhere around the mid to late 1990s. He said, whether it’s Mojo’s fault or not, him knowing I’m a huge spinning wing decoy fan, he said it was about that era that it’s like that technology made those woods accessible, despite skill set and experience, to a lot of other people. And he said that’s kind of when people started piling in and when things went south in terms of hospitality and whatnot.

Joel Strickland: Yeah, I mean, I would agree. There’s a lot of things going on in the mid to late 1990s. Our season length went longer, our limits went higher. A lot of people were jumping into hunting. Outdoor television. Ramsey Russell: Internet scouting.

Joel Strickland: In its heyday. People were watching, and I worked in the business. But I was always very careful that we weren’t telling people where we were going. But even still, it’s just not so much that you were telling people where you went, it was just the excitement of building and bringing people into the sport. It turned a lot of guys that had no mentor into successful duck hunters really quick because they had access to maybe a good place to go. They had spinning wing decoys or other devices that made it easier to shoot ducks. I know we kidded about those spinners in those first few years, saying, man, you could take one of them spinners and jab it in a concrete parking lot over at Walmart outside Stuttgart, and you could kill your limits sitting there with no problem because they worked that well. And it was amazing how well they worked. The first year I actually shot video the first day we ever hunted with them. I had no expectation that they were even going to work, okay. And it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. I told my buddy, we can’t tell anybody about this because it was that good. And obviously everybody found out about it. It didn’t take long before they weren’t as good as they were the first few times you used them. And then you had to use more of them, etc., etc. But I think that people’s disrespect for their fellow hunters is because they just didn’t have a mentor. I think the new guys coming on were not guys that had somebody that showed them the way.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, we talked about that also. I think you’re right. I learned to hunt under my parents, under my grandparents, under some older men. And I listened, mostly, for a hard-headed little kid, I listened, and I think it’s important.

Joel Strickland: I agree.

Ramsey Russell: I think there really and truly, there is a generation of what I call internet orphans. I’m not criticizing nobody. It is what it is. If you want to hunt, you get the information where you can. But they’re relying on other people that don’t have that age-old wisdom to counsel them. They’re all just kind of learning together. I mean, I encourage everybody just to get out and go hunting, man. I saw a thread just the other day, and it had been a long time, Joel, since I’d seen this thread, but a young man, obviously a young person on social media, had shot a few ducks and posted it up and misidentified one of the ducks he had killed. And here came the internet experts just wearing that kid out about knowing your target before you pull the trigger. Well, he did know it was a duck. That’s why some of these states have got splash limits developing or they’re experimenting with it. And at the end of the day, I can remember being that young kid that shot a duck I had to go look up in a bird book. I didn’t know what I’d killed. So I just feel like anytime I have the opportunity to counsel somebody like that, to lead them down the right road with this is the duck, and hey, by the way, here’s a great book you ought to look at for helping you learn what these birds are.

Joel Strickland: But Ramsey, I’ll tell you, I agree with all that you just said. I didn’t have a mentor when I first started duck hunting. I had two or three buddies that were about like me, trying to figure it out. I was passionate enough to get out there and do the work and learn things. But I was so grateful that I met this guy at church who was older than me. He was twice my age, in his 50s. He knew that I wanted to learn more about it because I kept asking him questions. I knew he knew something about duck hunting. He taught me how to tune my own call, how to call the right way and not just make a routine, and all that kind of stuff. That was so valuable to me. As I have gotten older, I’ve tried to be that to some guys. That’s really what my shtick is on YouTube and Surviving Duck Season, to be that guy that helps teach people how to duck hunt. It’s the best I can give to as many people as I can because I can’t be a mentor to more than a couple of guys at a time. But I can at least get online and share what I’ve learned, whether it’s the shotgun series or any of the other things that we talk about. Whether it’s tradition or whether it’s just, “this works and this is why we do it,” I think guys really appreciate that. I get texts, emails, and direct messages from a lot of the viewers that are close to my age and have been duck hunting for three years. “My kids want to duck hunt and I want to learn how to duck hunt, so I’m watching your stuff, thanks so much.” Or it’s the kids in the same position, they want to learn how to duck hunt. I think I get criticized by guys our age who are like, “Why are you giving away all the secrets?” Because you’re not. You need to help them, you need to teach them. How are they going to know what to do if all we do is criticize them for being kids who are just sky busting all the time?

Ramsey Russell: And with a lot of the symptoms we all see, especially on public land, that’s a manifestation of a need. We’re all in the same lifeboat together. If you don’t like the behaviour of another group, counsel them, work together. I think, it’s incumbent on us to try to bring them all in. If we can modify behaviour to get along, then it benefits everybody. It benefits them, the younger hunter, but it also benefits us, the older hunter. I think it’s all good stuff. Now Joel, here’s the flip side of the coin before we get back into the perfect trigger pull. Duck hunter, human being, grew up in Arkansas, fell off into duck hunting. But now, what also makes this YouTube channel and your series possible is the fact that you’re one heck of a videographer. Who was Joel Strickland, the young man, as a duck hunter, as a human being, that led you down the path? Now break, break. The first time I met you, you showed up at my hunting camp. You were going to film something, I don’t remember what. But unlike a lot of these other videographers that show up with a camera and maybe a tripod, dude, you set up a full-body, bore Hollywood studio set in my den with lights and bounce lights and cameras. I mean, holy cow, it was like a Hollywood studio. I mean, you ain’t just a videographer. You’ve obviously gone deep and got some experience in this stuff. How did you get into all this? And especially to that level, man, because that wasn’t just regular outdoor videography. That was, like I say, Hollywood.

Joel Strickland: Yeah. My background professionally is in film and television production. I’ve worked as a producer and a director in TV since the late 1980s. I’ve produced over 1,500 episodes of television, a lot of outdoor television, but also a lot of stuff for mainstream TV like Home and Garden Channel, History Channel, Food Network, those kinds of deals. Lots of music videos. I can’t even tell you how many television commercials.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of music videos? Like MTV?

Joel Strickland: Mostly country music artists and Christian music artists.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Joel Strickland: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I was gonna be shocked if I saw you on a rapper video I wasn’t aware of, I’m gonna tell you.

Joel Strickland: No, not my cup of tea. But yeah, I’ve done film and television for years and still do it. Doing YouTube, I’ve had guys tell me over the years, “You gotta do a YouTube channel.” I was like, that’s beneath me. I’m not into that. And now here I am. I mean, it replaced my income from a few years ago just because it’s doing so well for me. And that’s great, but it would have never been something I dreamed I’d be doing even 10 years ago. It just seemed like a place to repost something you did for a big production, or just some guy yapping to the camera. I really never thought I was going to be that, but it’s really been a fantastic opportunity to connect with the audience. I’ve met so many people because of it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Joel Strickland: I met you because of it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And I’m guessing, going from true Hollywood, major outdoor television and Home and Garden and stuff like that, as you transitioned to the new technology, the new platforms of social media, is that when it took kind of this educational bend? Because for as long as I’ve known you, Surviving Duck Season has been informational, it’s been informative. It’s been kind of trial and error, and all your programs have been a deep dive into something to edify the viewer.

Joel Strickland: Absolutely. The very first few episodes we did were very different because I was coming from a television background. I envisioned creating this very overproduced, high-end production quality, not really television, but long-form video. What it was about really was myself as a hunting guide in Stuttgart, another guy who’s a hunting guide on the East Coast, another guy that was a dog trainer and hunting guide in Texas, and a guy that has a place in Alaska waterfowl hunting. It was going to be wrapped around all of us doing what we do every single episode. Kind of like Deadliest Catch going between the boats, except it was us going between the hunting locations. I thought the episodes turned out great. They were super expensive and time-consuming to do, and they just kind of went off like a lead balloon. Just because people come to YouTube to learn something, for the most part.

Ramsey Russell: Right. Well, let’s jump into the perfect trigger pull. What are the elements of a shotgun pattern? Because we’re talking about perfecting a shotgun pattern. And I’m thinking so far we’ve talked about shotguns, various cartridges, and chokes. Are there any other elements we’re talking about here? Or does that pretty much sum up everything that we’re talking about.

Joel Strickland: That some distance would be the only other thing is what distance you’re shooting at. That’s going to dictate what type of choke you want to put in your shotgun. But yeah, that’s it. You need to know what distance and you need to know the type of game you’re going after. Because if you’re shooting doves versus shooting Canada geese, there’s a big difference in the type of pattern you’re looking for. You need bigger pellets for bigger birds, right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Joel Strickland: So that’s really it.

Ramsey Russell: Where should we start on this right here? Should we start with shotgun shot chokes?

Joel Strickland: I think everything is a combination. Everything is also a trade-off. What you do with one aspect can change all of the others. Your distance changes things. Your shot size changes things. The type of charge that you have in the cartridge changes things. The gauge somewhat changes things. It doesn’t change as much as people think it does, and we can get into more of that part of it later. But everything is a trade-off. I’ll just tell you straight off what my favourite combination is, and we can work back from there. My favorite combination, I shoot a 28 gauge every day at duck season. I’ve been doing that for the last couple of years. Before that, I was shooting a 12 gauge, and then I moved to a 20 gauge. But I really use the same thing all the way around. I like number five bismuth, two and three-quarter. Whether it’s out of a 28 gauge, a 20 gauge, or 12 gauge, two and three-quarter, it patterns the best. And you don’t have leftover waste because that’s really what it is. There’s so much packed into that pattern that you don’t really see. We’ll have to talk a lot more about that here in a few minutes. But that’s what I like to shoot. I shoot Muller choke tubes. I found that after testing nearly 50 choke tubes, that one outperformed everything else that we tested in multiple different guns. I typically shoot a decoy choke, which is good. Your optimum distance is out to 35 yards. You can do a little bit further than that if you have to. But if you’re shooting 35 yards and under, then that one definitely is the one to shoot. And then if you’re normally shooting, say, 25 or 30 and out to 50, then I would shoot the passing choke from Muller. And that’s my combo. I shoot sixes when I know I’m going to be shooting my decoy choke. I’m shooting sixes. When I’m in the woods, I’m shooting sevens. And that’s all bismuth. That’s what I have found to be the best combination for what I do. My thoughts are I’m always trying to get ducks in as close as I possibly can. I want to shoot them feet down, trying to land in the decoys at 20 yards or less. But realistically, that’s not always the case for anybody. If you shoot and you get one bird down and you want to go for a second one, most of the time they’re not the same distance as the first trigger pull. So you got to consider that.

What’s my second and third trigger pull? What’s the distance? Is it going to be within that 35 yards because they’re in a tight hole in the woods? Or are you in a big, wide open area and they can get away from you and you’re shooting at 40 yards plus? So you always have to consider that and then match the ammo and the choke for your distance of what you’re shooting.

Ramsey Russell: To your point, I do not shoot exclusively a 28 gauge, but I mostly shoot a 28 gauge in North America, from teal season in September clear through big Canada geese, sea ducks, decoying fields, dry fields, decoying snows, pass shooting. I’m a 28 gauge fan, and I shoot a Benelli Super Black Eagle 3 modified choke. Boy, I tell you what, I do like the copper-plated bismuth and the sevens for teal season and their decoying ducks. I’m a pattern density guy. The more little bitty dots I can put in a 30-inch circle, the better. But really and truly, as a universal, because not knowing between September 13th and January 31st the number of scenarios where I’m going to be and what I’m going to be shooting, what I’m going to be doing, and wanting something in the back seat of my truck that I can just pull out and go, I’ve gone 3-inch 4s, factory mod, and that just suits me well for everything. One thing I noticed, and I have put it on paper, I’m happy with it, but most of my patterning I feel like is confidence in the air. You know what I’m saying? It’s how it performs in the air. One thing I remember, in one of your shotgun series segments, as you started looking at 12-gauge chokes, one thing that jumped out to you, boy, you broke out the calipers and everything, was the fact that a 12 gauge is not a 12 gauge. It’s not a 12 gauge, It’s not a 12 gauge. That the barrel diameter varied greatly with manufacturers. How did it vary, and what does that have to do with the pattern?

Joel Strickland: Yeah, it has everything to do with your pattern. It has everything to do with the choke tube, and it goes into a lot of the problems that we’ve seen out of aftermarket choke tubes all these years.

Ramsey Russell: The problem being, what you’re saying about the problem, it’d be why if I take a certain choke, and the decoy, whatever, and put it in my gun, that’s why I may get a different output than you putting it in your gun, or him putting it in his gun, or her putting it in her gun. Is that what you’re saying?

Joel Strickland: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Again it’s not a one-size-fits-all.
Joel Strickland: Yeah. And I don’t have the numbers right here in front of me, but just in general, .725 I believe is kind of the standard 12-gauge diameter, okay? Exit diameter on your bore, okay? All of the 12 gauges are chambered the same. That means where you put your shotgun shell into the gun and where it fits up there at the bottom of the barrel, that’s all the same. It’s the exit diameter of the barrel all the way at the very end, that’s what changes. If you look at the original shotguns from the late 1800s, those started off all basically the same, Remingtons, Brownings, Winchesters. Those guns are pretty well standard. Then after that you start seeing new manufacturers decide how they can make their 12-gauge better. So, they start monkeying with, as I like to call it, the bore diameter. Now today, you have differences in bore diameter. Most of your Italian guns are a lot smaller than the standard bore diameter, and then something like a Mossberg is basically a 10-gauge.
Ramsey Russell: It sure is that. They’ve always had a big size bore diameter.
Joel Strickland: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Why is that, do you think?
Joel Strickland: Well, the bigger the bore diameter, the more forgiveness you get. You’ve got to be a lot more precise and there’s a lot more to do on the choke side when you have a smaller diameter. I think Italian guns, they feel like theirs are better. Again, if you don’t get the choke tube right, none of it matters. So, to get back to what the problem is, just because a choke tube is threaded for a Benelli or a Winchester or a Mossberg, and it fits in the gun, doesn’t mean it’s produced properly. What I have determined through 12,000 to 14,000 rounds through umpteen guns is that the differences in the bore diameters, well, I didn’t make the chokes, so I’m just supposing, but what appears to have happened is, they’d say this is what a modified is. I don’t remember the numbers, because I don’t go by those anymore, but it’s like a certain number of decimal points over makes it an open choke, modified, improved cylinder, skeet, etc. Then an aftermarket choke tube guy goes, “All I have to do is make those numbers line up, screw the thread in, and we’ve got a choke tube that works.” And that’s the problem. That doesn’t work. When we were testing choke tubes, someone says, “I’m an extra full,” another says, “I’m a modified,” another says, “I’m an improved cylinder.” Whatever case may be. Then you pattern test it, this brand versus factory choke versus another brand in a different gun, they’re all over the place. You’re not getting what you’re supposed to get. You’re not getting a modified every single time. You’re not getting an improved cylinder every time. It was worse in the factory tubes. Almost every factory tube we tested was different than it should have been. I tested four different modified out of my gun and only got one that was really a modified.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Joel Strickland: Yeah. So then we started saying, “I wonder if it’s like that in the Benellis.” We did several guns, I mean everything we tried, Berettas, they didn’t work.
Ramsey Russell: To your point, when I shoot a factory mod, especially out of the 12-gauge, but also out of the 28, let’s say, I am swatting a duck on the water at 35 or 40 yards, it never ceases to surprise me how tight that pattern is. Much more tighter than if I shoot that old 1970s-era modified Remington on the water at 35-40 yards. I promise it’s going to look more like the size of a trash can pattern versus a soccer ball. It shocks me every time how tight that pattern is coming out of my gun at 35-40 yards. And a 28-gauge, it is. I love watching these Shot cam videos or iPhone videos. And countless times I see a duck get hit, I go, “You’re shooting a 28?” They go, “Yeah, how’d you know?” I go, “That freaking, it looked like somebody hit a ball with a pool cue.” That pattern is so, boom. It’s almost like a little projectile instead of a shotgun pattern. That’s just how tight it is But sometimes I see it as too tight too. I’ve shot chokes that are just too tight. I know that’s become a conversation the past couple of years, who can get the tightest pattern. I’m not turkey hunting, man. I’m bird hunting. I want about a three-foot pattern out there. You know what I’m saying? Something I can snag, break a wing, and hit a vital, get Char Dog out there on the scene. I don’t want to shoot a pattern the size of a snuff can. I’m not that good a shot. I don’t want to cleanly hit or cleanly miss, because that’s not what happens lot of time. A lot of times, you’ll catch a stray BB, and then you’ve really got problems, you know what I’m saying? If you catch a bird on the outside of a real tight pattern. So anyway, I’m just running down a rabbit hole because my head’s swimming. How many times I’ve had this conversation, this question. Pursuant to you making this video series, Joel, how many times did you physically pull the trigger, would you guess? How many shots did you make from start to finish of your shotgun series?
Joel Strickland: Oh, I lost count after 10,000.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Wow.
Joel Strickland: But I know between 12,000 and 14,000.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Joel Strickland: I can’t tell you how many cases and cases of shells I shot. I got everybody’s stuff. Cases of everybody’s stuff.
Ramsey Russell: I know you were looking for the perfect trigger pull for yourself, that’s what started this project. But as you were expanding with all the different, you told me you started with your shotgun, then broke off into a lot of different manufacturers and sizes, you started with a few shotgun shells and chokes, but began to expand. You found your perfect pattern, this 28-gauge, this Muller choke, these Ball Shot shells, two and three-quarter-inch load, that is your boom that hits you to a T. But as you expanded, it’s kind of hard to compare bismuth with tungsten with steel shot. To me it is, because we’re talking apples and oranges right here. Did you do enough research to say, okay, with this type of shot, maybe a stacked steel shot, or a stacked something else, or solid steel, were you able, after all these 12,000 to 14,000 trigger pulls, to say, “If I shot a three-inch, ounce-and-a-quarter steel 3, this is the combo I’d go with”? Were you able to break it out into cadres like that also?
Joel Strickland: Yeah. Just some of the things that I learned, like you talked about, having more pellets in your pattern is key to all of it. In steel shot, I would say number 3s would be the largest pellets that I would use, 4s being better. You really can’t go any smaller than 4s unless you’re really close and shooting small birds.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Joel Strickland: And so, but threes and fours, I would buy the premium steel shot because you can definitely see a difference in buying premium steel. Premium steel being Drylok, Winchester, Fiocchi, what’s that, oh, which one is that? Golden something? I can’t remember. Whatever, that’s their premium steel line. And what you get with premium steel is a super spherical pellet. Not the slag pellets like you get out of Winchester Expert Shot, for example, that’s just got a bunch of dimples and slag pieces. Half of them are threes, some of them are twos, and you might have some ones in there. And you don’t want that because you can’t get a good, even, consistent pattern. Because when you shoot a pattern board, and shooting a pattern board is not perfect by any means, but at least it kind of gives you an idea of what you’re shooting. You want an even distribution of pellets in your 30-inch circle. Not having holes in your pattern, that’s what you get when you have more pellets and more perfect round pellets. That’s what you want, whether it’s steel shot, bismuth, TSS, or whatever. And so, it seems like what we were finding is the more premium steel shot, you were getting a better pattern out of. So that’s number one. Same with the rest of it. Although, when you jump up into bismuth, most all of that is good round shot. And then the tungsten blends were problematic because a lot of the tungsten blends have a lot of slag in them. Heavy-Shot is really bad about that. Now, some of the higher-end Heavy-Shot now is more spherical, but a lot of the early days’ Havy-Shot was not very round. We cracked open lots and lots of pellets and found pellets welded together and all that kind of stuff. Which means it’s fine if you’re shooting close, but if you’re shooting close, what do you need tungsten for? Why spend the extra money to buy the tungsten? Steel shot is great. Really, anything is great inside 25 yards. There’s no reason to spend extra money on anything else because you’re in such close range. But when you start getting outside of this ultra-close, right over the top of the decoys, that’s where it’s important to go with super round pellets. Go with as small a pellet as you can get away with because the smaller the pellets, the more pellets there are, which gives you better pattern density. And that’s what it’s all about as far as your pattern goes. But if you don’t have enough pattern density, as far as your pellets, the weight of your pellets, that’s where you’re going to have problems with actually killing the bird. And that’s what we need. And that’s why we start talking about tungsten. That’s why we start talking about TSS and bismuth.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ll say. I’ll follow up just to add this right here. I have killed gazillions of waterfowl hunting preceding the bismuth-tin alloy, copper-plated, you know, dawn of that era. I have shot a lot of ducks with an ounce and a quarter steel 3 Federal blue box. And I’m looking around, making sure my wife ain’t listening. She finds out we got a fortune sitting at camp in Alaska. I mean, I have got ammo stashed for days all over the place. One of these days, somebody’s gonna open it, and it’s gonna be like opening up King Tut’s tomb and seeing all this ammo I’ve got salted away over the years. You never can tell if you’re gonna need it. Really and truly, I did not do the rigorous studies you’ve done. I did not compare all the different stuff like you did, Joel. That particular load, at the time, hit me right budget-wise and duck-from-the-strap-wise. I would always buy a lot of steel threes, and then I’d buy a little steel 2 because sometimes I felt like I needed that extra little weight in a heavy wind when we’re hunting those pit blinds or something like that. But I am a huge steel 3 fan. You’ve got to remember this, back when you first went duck hunting in Arkansas with your buddy back in the 1980s, that would have been lead, man. That was the good old lead days. And back in those days, I did shoot some sixes. But mostly, I shot 2¾ inch, 7½.
Joel Strickland: Did you really?
Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah. I mean, the kind of habitat I hunted a lot, and I shot it at squirrels, I shot it at rabbits, I shot it at ducks, I shot it at doves. It was all the same. I had never even thought about going out and patterning a gun until, by necessity, here comes this steel shot mandate. The first thing that started to emerge very quickly on the scene in the late 1990s, early 2000s, as steel shot began to take over the market, was the fact, one, it’ll destroy an old papaw’s gun because that stuff is not malleable coming out the barrel like lead was. And number two, you better go shoot paper and figure out what you got. Let me tell you, those first iterations of steel shot, nobody had anything in terms of a choke compared to lead. There wasn’t any pattern at all compared to lead on some of those first iterations, ounce and ⅜ steel whatever’s. It was terrible. And it got even worse if your shells got wet and that steel rusted together between seasons. You might have a real bad pattern or barrel damage coming out the following year. So those were the battle days of non-tox. You went through all that, I’m guessing. Did you go out and pattern back in those days too?
Joel Strickland: I shot water with it because I wanted to see what it looked like on water. I never patterned. I don’t think I ever patterned duck loads until probably about the end of the late 1990s.
Ramsey Russell: And underground pigeon shooters were the only people that patterned at all out of a shotgun, preceding steel shot.
Joel Strickland: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: Now in the last, I’m gonna say really and truly, this “know your pattern, take ethical shots, make clean kills” really became a narrative six, seven years ago. That’s really when that hit a fever pitch. And it was eye-opening to me. I have not done near the rigorous research you have and probably never will. But at the same time, I do go out and I do shoot paper or I shoot the water or I shoot a dirt bank and look at where that hits. And I do a whole lot of quote, pattern in the sky, you know what I’m saying? It doesn’t take long at all to know that if all of a sudden you’re puffing a few birds, you better tighten up.
Joel Strickland: About three years ago. No, it’s been longer than that I guess now it’s probably been about five years ago. I started asking every guy that sat in my blind. I asked them, what I would say is, “Hey, guys, how many of you all have patterned the shotgun choke and shot shells that you’re shooting today?” How many of you all patterned those? And the first duck season, I asked everybody in the blind. I got one guy that said he had. The second year I did it again, and I think I got maybe five or six guys that said they had. I mean, I was doing research again for my series, because I knew what I was going to get. I figured there were very few people who had done it. All my buddies, I asked them, no, no, no. I mean, my guide buddies that were guiding with me, no, no, no. I’m like, why is it that a turkey hunter, a guy that shoots his bow, a rifle guy, everybody knows exactly what their gun or bow is doing. They know exactly where it’s going. But a duck hunter is not. And duck hunters shoot more ammo than anybody does. But why wouldn’t you want to know?

Ramsey Russell: Right. Exactly. Why wouldn’t you want to know? Joel, what were some of the biggest surprises you saw as you started experimenting with shotgun shot or cartridge and chokes, stuff like that? What were some of the biggest aha moments that you noticed as you started this?

Joel Strickland: Well, I would say the biggest was in regard to the choke tubes. The aftermarket choke tubes. I kind of believed that the aftermarket choke tubes were a joke, and there’s no reason why you should do that. I thought you could get away with using factory chokes, but then found that almost all the factory chokes that I shot were not what they said they were. Now, let me say this to qualify that. I think just because you have a choke tube that doesn’t shoot what it is marked to shoot doesn’t mean it’s a bad choke tube. But what it means is go out there and pattern that gun. And if you shoot that modified that says it’s supposed to be, and it’s not, it’s really an improved cylinder, you at least know what it is.

Ramsey Russell: What were the criteria for that? Why were you saying that it was this versus that? I put in a factory model. What were you seeing that made you say, “No, no, no, this is a full or this is an improved cylinder, not a mod?”

Joel Strickland: It’s either too wide or too narrow at the distance.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Joel Strickland: Because there’s a criteria that the industry has. You shoot at 40 yards, whatever your ammo is, and at 40 yards, you should have this size of a pattern, this much percentage of your pattern. I believe it’s, I don’t even want to get into it because I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but there’s a certain percentage. It might be 70% for an improved cylinder, and 60% for a modified, or whatever. But that percentage at 40 yards is how much should be in the circle. I had the opportunity to use some computerized equipment that helped me not have to circle and count dots.

Ramsey Russell: That was amazing technology. That technology is available to anybody, isn’t it?

Joel Strickland: It is. I mean, to shoot 12 or 13 or 14,000 rounds, and then I’ve got to count and circle all the dots and then count them up and do the percentages and all that, I’d never get it done. So there are two different ones that I use. One of them is called Lucky Weasel, which is a patterning, it’s a great big box that you can shoot into, and it’s got a camera and a computer. It will shoot a picture of your pattern on the paper and then tell you exactly how many pellets are in it. It tells you what choke you used, your pattern density, the whole nine yards. And it shows you where the holes in the pattern are, and so if is good pattern. My criteria, when I say that’s a good pattern and that’s a bad pattern, there’s very few people that I think can actually look at a pattern with their eyeballs and go, “Oh, that’s a good pattern,” unless you’ve done the math and seen hundreds upon hundreds of them. It’s really hard to know. I think it’s super important for guys to use the technology. Lucky Weasel is out of price range for 99% of the people listening to this podcast. But there’s another one called Target Telemetrics, and it is an app on your phone.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Joel Strickland: And it’s free. You have to buy their paper. It’s specific gridded paper that allows you to take a picture with their app, and then it counts the dots for you. That right there is very powerful, to go snap a picture and then know immediately what you’re doing. Now, I will say this, nothing is perfect. It’s very important that you keep the paper perfect. You don’t want to crease it. You don’t want to put it up and have it be slightly off. You really need to do your work to make sure your pattern’s right. Most people aren’t shooting 500 pieces of paper today. Most people are shooting four or eight. So it’s not that hard to take a few extra moments and make sure you get all the creases out, pull the paper real nice and tight, and do those things. If you do those things the right way and get it on a good flat board in the background, then you will get an accurate reading. It’s tremendous. You buy their papers, it’s expensive for paper, but you’re not. Go spend 50 bucks and know what your gun’s doing.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. I mean, that little bit of expense is irrelevant in the grand scheme of duck hunting. Truly. For a lot of us right here. We’re talking patterns right here, and one thing that’s always, and I know you did, I know you did this, I want to elaborate. A lot of the pattern that we’re talking about, you’ve got a piece of paper at 35–40 yards downrange, you get spot, Boom. You shoot it. It’s very two-dimensional. That’s not reality for duck hunting. Unless we’re shooting ducks on the water, that is not reality. This is what I’ve always been interested in. Okay, I know what my pattern is doing when I’m shooting a stationary object. But that’s not reality. That’s very flat and two-dimensional. In reality, I’m shooting at a duck or a goose. I’m throwing a 3D object. Let’s just say the duck is flying right to left. When I pull that trigger, he’s flying 35 miles an hour, and I’m swinging and staying in front of him. I’m covering 10 or 15-yard swath. That shot string is now expressed from left to right for five, ten, whatever yards. I mean, it’s sweeping. What I’m trying to say is, I’m shooting this target, boom, taped up on the board, boom, it’s going one place, 30-inch circle. But in reality, shooting at a flying duck, it’s like the side of an 18-wheeler trailer. I’m covering a whole big thing and trying to put that duck in that 3D pattern. That makes sense, what I’m saying? Surely it does.

Joel Strickland: It makes sense. I’m gonna tell you, I used to articulate exactly what you did, pretty much the way you did, before we started doing testing. I was super interested in the shot string. That’s what we’re talking about, the shot string. The shot string is your string of pellets as it leaves the barrel. It’s not just a fist-size wad of pellets that separate.

Ramsey Russell: How long is a shot string? 10 feet?

Joel Strickland: It depends. It depends on the type of ammo you’re using. It also depends on the gauge that you put it out of. It depends on the length of the cartridge that you shoot it out of. It can be anywhere from 4 feet to almost 30 feet.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Joel Strickland: That’s what we determined. I was very interested in the shot string even as a young guy. I remember reading in the 1980s, I read some magazine articles talking about the shot string. Bob Brister and some other guys talked a lot about the shot string. They were supposing that, just as you’ve articulated, when you shoot, you’ve got this swath of pellets. Again, maybe 30 feet is 10 yards. That’s a lot of inventory that your pellets could be. So can we handicap ourselves? Can we take advantage of the shot string to help us hit a flying target? Bob Brister even went to the extent of enrolling his wife to help him do some demonstrations, very crudely back, I guess it was in the late 1960s or early 1970s. They drove a car with a trailer behind it with a big pattern board, and he would shoot at it trying to hit the target on the board and see what the shot string would do. Very crudely done. The results that he got would make you believe that yes, the shot string could give you an advantage, allowing you to miss a little bit because the bird might fly into your shot string or whatever. That’s kind of where I went into it. But if you looked at that, it’s a hypothesis that that’s what was going on. They really didn’t replicate that over and over again to where you could really say with any certainty that that was exactly what was happening. But there was a lot of debate back and forth in the shotgun journals, guys saying, “Well, no, it can’t be that,” and some guys, “Yes.” Two different camps. So I decided when I started working on the shotgun series, I wanted to see it. Several different companies have talked about shooting slow-mo of the shot string, one of which was Pattern Master, the choke tube company. They talked about how they had created a choke tube that would shorten the shot string. Their theory was, the shorter the shot string, the more of an impact your pellets would be in hitting a bird. If it was a longer shot string, you wouldn’t have as much energy. We want to make the shot string as short as we can. They said that they shortened the shot string 80%. That means if you had a ten-foot shot string, then you would have a two-foot shot string if you used a Pattern Master. This was fascinating to me. I’ve had several buddies that shot Pattern Master like they thought it was the greatest thing in the world. “Watch when I shoot this duck, what happens to it,” and all this sort of thing. We started patterning those two choke tubes. Then I started trying to find a slow-mo camera that we could see the shot string. I rented a couple that you could rent, and you could see nothing. I even reached out to Pattern Master and asked them, “What slow-mo did you use?” because they said they did, even though they haven’t shown it to the public. “Show us what you viewed.” Crickets. Working in the film and television business, I know people. I started doing some research about where I could find a high-speed, super slow-mo camera. It took me days and days, and I finally got a company, which I had used their products before, Phantom is the name of the camera. Most of their cameras will shoot 10,000 frames a second or less. You’ve got to have a whole lot more than that if you’re going to stop a speeding bullet, as they say. We’re coming out of the gun barrel between 1,300 and 1,500 feet a second. So you’ve got to be able to see the little individual pellets and see how they move and how they grow. I talked to a guy and said, “Here’s what I’m trying to do. Do you have a camera that will do that?” And the guy said, “We just released it.”

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Joel Strickland: I’m like, “You got to be kidding me.” He said, “Nope. We released that thing like four months ago.” I said, “Okay, how do I get my hands on one?” He said, “Well, we have two of them in North America.”

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Joel Strickland: “And they’re for rent.” He said, “We’ve also got a couple that we could sell you. They cost $305,000.”

Ramsey Russell: I’ll take two of them. You take a chance.

Joel Strickland: Exactly. So I rented one. It was a huge ordeal. It’s very, very expensive. I mean, it cost as much or more than a lot of the cameras that I bought, just to rent it for a week. Okay, it’s like 20,000 bucks or so. And then, on top of that, who the heck knows how to run this thing? So it took me and my DP like four days just to learn how to use it and go through some of the problems. You have to have all this extra lighting. You got to do it outside on a sunny day, and then you still got to use reflectors and supportive lighting and all this kind of stuff just so you could see it. And so we had this, we had a black background, and then we had reflectors and then the sun and all that so you could actually see the pellets on the background reflected. And we shot at 180,000 frames a second. And then we sped it up. Because if you play 180,000 frames a second, gunshot goes off that quick, right? Okay. You know how fast a gunshot goes. You know how fast, if you just shoot a target at 30 yards, how fast that target is broken or it hits the pattern board or whatever. It’s that fast. But if you hit the play button and watch 180,000 frames a second, it takes like, I don’t know, it’s like a minute to watch it. Well, you don’t want to watch, I mean, you can put a video together, but you’re gonna sit there and watch it for a minute go like super slow. So we sped it up so you could watch it. But that’s when we took the background and we put markers on the background one foot apart so then we could know how many feet it was traveling. We had all these markers on the black background, white markers, and then you could see how fast it was traveling. And then we knew what the speed was. And then that’s how we could determine how long the shot string was, how fast it was going, what it was doing. And we learned an incredible amount about what ammunition does and different types of ammunition. The way it works, bismuth and lead fly way slower than tungsten, or as far as, the shot string is longer in lead and bismuth than TSS. TSS has got the shortest shot string. It’s like, I said, four feet long. It’s super slow. Another thing that we learned was when you put blended ammunition together, like if you have steel shot and bismuth or steel shot and TSS, those kinds of combos.

Ramsey Russell: Two different sizes of steel shot.

Joel Strickland: Well, but the main thing is the two different metals. You would see one metal getting there, and then there would be like a 5 or 10 or 12-foot break.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Joel Strickland: Nothing.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what I’m always worried about.

“I’ve got different types of content categorized, including the shotgun series. There’s 10 episodes. I challenge you to start at the first one and watch them all the way through, because what you learn kind of builds on each video as you go through, and we’re going to be adding more to it.”

Joel Strickland: And then the other would hit. So, and it’s a happy, depending on distance, too. Because steel shot, even though a lot of steel shot is 1500 feet a second out of the barrel, and bismuth is 1300. A lot of it is like the Boss ammo that I shoot is 1300, 1350 feet a second out the barrel. It often arrives at the target at the same time when you’re shooting at 40 yards, because it slows down a lot quicker. And so there’s a lot of that stuff you could actually see with your own eyes. That’s really cool. But what I did notice when we compared using the slow-mo and the pattern board, we noticed that if you mix different blends together, if you have TSS and steel shot or bismuth and steel shot, it didn’t do nearly as well as if you just used all steel or all bismuth or all tungsten. The blended shot didn’t look as good either. The only combo that I looked at that I thought was good was the Boss 3-5s. For whatever reason, the 3-5 combination was like the secret sauce that worked really, really well. If you looked at 2s and 4s, you looked at 5s and 7s, you looked at 1s and whatever’s, I mean, I looked at a lot of it. I mean, lots of different brands have all these duplex-type loads, and none of them looked very good except for the 3-5.

Ramsey Russell: Huh? So let’s sum this up. When I’m looking at a stationary target that I’m pulling the trigger on, here’s what blows, so that lead pellet on the shot string and the last pellet are all on that piece of paper. That makes no sense to me except, hey, it looks good. Whereas if I’m shooting a bird from right to left 40 miles an hour and I’m swinging, my lead pellet’s going to be on the right and my last pellet is going to be on the left over a period of time. Could you see that? How was that shot string expressed going right to left on that three, not just north and south, but east and west also. Now tell the story. What are you seeing now?

Joel Strickland: So here’s the story, okay? The story is, with our waterfowl ammo that we use today and the speed and the length of the shot string in which it is today, there is not a nickel’s difference in a short shot string and a long shot string. And what is expressed, and you’re right, left to right. Okay? We’re talking like inches. Okay? Can six inches matter to you? No, not when your pattern is 30 to 40 inches. I mean, you’re talking about half a foot. Even if it was a foot, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. And so we’ve determined, you’re talking about hundredths of a second in difference from the first pellet to the last pellet in your shot string hitting the target. And so we shot a clay target thrown through the air at approximately 40 miles an hour. Okay? And we shot at about, probably 30 yards. It was like 28 to 32 yards in that little window. And that’s where the shot broke the target. And inside that, it moved this much, okay? From the first pellet to the last pellet hitting it that much. Okay? And so that blew my mind because I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting it to really make a big difference, and it just doesn’t. And so I have full intent of running that camera rig again and doing more research and doing a lot more of that because I want to see it at as many different distances as we can do to see if you got out to 50 yards, if at 50 yards you would make a difference in the shot string and it would help you out. I will say this. When we were talking about the Pattern Master and shortening the shot string, did you see the video? Do you know what the results were, we came up with.

Ramsey Russell: Describe it.

Joel Strickland: Yeah, we shot it in, I think, three different guns, we used a Pattern Master, and we tried it with, I can’t tell you how many different ammo. A lot of different ammo. And one shot, it shortened the shot string by about 10%. And there were probably at least three or four that we did that actually lengthened the shot string, and everything else was negligible that it did anything.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Joel Strickland: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Good news. All right. We’ve been talking about patterning, Joel. We’ve been talking about pattern. We’re talking about the perfect trigger pull. Pattern is everything. But to me, there’s also another part of the perfect trigger pull that’s going to be penetration. Did you all look at penetration?

Joel Strickland: We did. We did a lot of shooting.

Ramsey Russell: I’m thinking of a conversation I had up in Alberta this year as we were cleaning birds. The boys I’m hunting with shoot a lot of steel shot. And they were critical as we were resting birds that they saw a lot of copper plated inside the bird. They didn’t see a lot of their shot inside the bird. They saw a lot of mine. And I may often be wrong. Often wrong, never in doubt, am I? But borrowing from rifle coefficient stuff like that, what I want to see in a rifle, when I pull the trigger on a deer, I don’t want to see an entry and exit. What I know is the perfect load is going to be when I find that bullet buried up under that hide on the opposing side of what I shot. Because I know that projectile unloaded 100% of its energy inside that animal. Boom. This is shock trauma. I tried to explain that to these boys. They didn’t buy it. But I don’t see the problem, because I know that when I see pellets inside this animal, all that energy hit that animal. Whereas if it passes through like steel shot, it’s not deforming, it’s not breaking apart, it’s not imparting energy, it’s passing cleanly through. Trauma’s trauma. I ain’t saying that’s not going to kill a bird. It will. But personally, I like knowing that projectile lost a lot of energy inside that live target. So now, with that in mind, even if I’m wrong or right, whatever, let’s talk about some of the penetration tests, because that’s very important to me. How deeply? Who cares how fast it’s leaving the barrel? Is it slowing down? Is it going to have downrange energy when it clobbers that bird?

Joel Strickland: Yeah. And what you express is exactly the same way I see it. Some of the problems that we have with steel shot is that it either bounces off the bird or just gets under the skin.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Joel Strickland: Or it shoots all the way through the animal. And so you don’t have that hydro shock of it hitting the animal and all that energy going into the animal and shutting down its nervous system. I mean, that’s what happens when you shoot a deer with a ballistic tip bullet. It goes inside and pancakes that rascal right to the ground. He doesn’t run off. And that’s what’s happening, the hydro shock, because of that energy going inside that animal and not going any further. Whereas you center-punch a deer in the gut, and it goes in one side and out the other, and he runs off, you don’t find him. And that’s, I think, what was happening a lot of days, especially in the early days of steel shot. I wanted to know the same thing. We did a lot of testing in shooting ballistic gel, so we could know what the penetration was. Ballistic gel was developed by the FBI years ago so they could look at the ballistics of bullets. We can take, and I’ll say this, there’s a lot of people that want to take ballistic gel and have a formula to know, “Well, if it gets 2 inches of penetration in ballistic gel, then it’s good enough.” No. I don’t believe any of that either. I think what you have to do is know this is a known standard that will kill a duck. Then you can look at that in ballistic gel and compare it to something else you’re not sure of and know that it’s probably going to work or not. For example, when you start using a sub-gauge, people have always wondered, well, a 28 gauge is a girl’s gun or it’s a kid’s gun or it’s mainly for an expert that can really hit them. Versus a 12 gauge, that’s something we should be hunting with. But we would take and shoot 28 gauge number 4s or 5s or 6s into ballistic gel, and it gets exactly the same penetration that a 12 gauge shooting it does. It doesn’t matter. At the speed that it comes out of the barrel, it’s going to hit that ballistic gel and go the same depth every time. So there’s a lot of ways you can use ballistic gel to test. If you use a known successful medium or a known successful ammo into that medium, then you can compare something you’re not sure about. I like number 4s, but what about 7s? Well, here’s what 7 looks like, it doesn’t get quite as much penetration, but it’s still good enough. That kind of thing. I’ll tell you something interesting. Talk about TSS. The penetration of TSS in ballistic gel is a lot deeper. Most of the time guys are using 7s, 8s, or 9s with TSS shooting ducks. You’ll definitely get probably 25% more penetration in ballistic gel at the same distance than you would with, say, bismuth. What I found interesting in our hunting tests that we did with TSS, I don’t know how much TSS you’ve shot, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Back in the day a Bunch. Back when tungsten.

“If you’re going to shoot that far, then you need to shoot at that distance as well and test all of your different ammo, test all of your different choke tubes to know exactly what it’s doing, to know if a modified really is a modified, and to know if you just need to go start over and buy a new choke.”

Joel Strickland: Well, so there’s a difference though. Tungsten is 12 grams per cubic centimetre, that’s the density. Some of it’s less than that. There’s always been this debate about what was Heavy-Shot or some of these other guys doing with their density. But the accepted value is about 12, which is a little better than lead. That’s why Heavy-Shot called themselves Heavy-Shot, because it’s heavier than lead. But that’s kind of where it was. Then there were a few companies that came out with some that were a little heavier, Hevi-13, Hevi-15. But TSS is 18. And that stuff’s off the chart. That’s why it’s like seven, eight dollars a load. It’s really expensive. So we did a lot of testing because a lot of guys are shooting that for turkeys. Then it started getting popular about three or four years ago in the waterfowl world. So I bought a couple of cases. Apex sent me some, and some other guys sent me some too. We tested it out. It’s super impressive at long distance if you can hit them. If you’re a good enough shot to shoot a bird at 70–80 yards, you can definitely do it. There’s no question it’s capable of killing a bird at that distance if you’ve got a good pattern. But the thing I wondered was, okay, is this a good all-around load. I mean, I’ve got 200 rounds of this stuff and I’m gonna shoot it over the next few weeks, so I’m gonna shoot it everywhere. What I noticed was inside 30 yards, it was not impressive to me. Unless you hit them in the head and totally collapsed the bird. But if you weren’t getting a good hit on them, they would fly away or dive on you. I was like, why is it doing that? Because every single bird we cleaned, there were no pellets in them. At that close distance, it’s complete pass-through. But the birds you shoot at 70 yards, it crushes them, and they’re completely out, just like that. So it goes back to the same thing we’re talking about, the hydro shock. Same thing. So pick the ammo for the distance you’re going to shoot. I don’t know that a lot of guys are capable of hunting or shooting at distances past 50 yards. Most people aren’t. But that’s what that ammunition is designed for, sea duck hunting, passing diver shooting, things like that. Somebody that’s really capable of shooting at those distances, it’s not unethical, in my opinion, if they can hit them, because that’s what that ammo is best for. But to me, if you’re not shooting past 50 yards, you’re not doing yourself any favour by shooting that stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Did you see a lot of your studies? A lot of this energy equals mass. It’s a function of mass and speed. Steel shot is much lighter than lead. Therefore, during the steel shot non-tox era, we’re going to compensate by upping the speeds. Nonetheless, at a given distance, no matter how fast it comes out of the barrel, it’s starting to slow down. As it slows down, I’m getting less penetration because I’ve got less energy. What can you speak to in terms of, let’s just pick out steel versus copper-plated bismuth? What were you seeing in terms of penetration at given distances? Energy delivered at a common range, let’s say a common range. Let’s not talk 50, 60, 70 yards. Let’s talk 30 to 40 yards. What are we seeing in terms of penetration with the average steel shot versus the average copper-plated bismuth?

Joel Strickland: What I looked at is your maximum comfortable range for steel shot is 40 yards.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Joel Strickland:       I mean, not to say that you can’t shoot one and kill something further, but in order, you got a trade-off with all of it. But I think that’s your maximum range, 40 yards comfortably on a regular basis. And that’s what I try to tell people. If you’re shooting further than 40 yards, you need to be looking at having something with a little bit more mass. That’s why guys start shooting BBs, because they want to shoot further.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Joel Strickland: Problem with BBs is you can’t get enough pellets in your pattern. Pattern density is like 70 pellets or less in your pattern. And you’re really looking to get 100 pellets in your 30-inch circle, is what you’re looking for at whatever distance you’re shooting. And so if you can get 100 pellets in there, then you are going to give the best chance for an ethical kill if you can put that pattern on a bird.

Ramsey Russell: Did you shoot, did you do any lead shot, all this? I mean, because that kind of, to me, talking to people today that for 30 years have been shooting waterfowl with non-tox in North America. Sometimes I hear, I see it go right over their heads. Lead is the Holy Grail, because since time immemorial, humanity shot lead at waterfowl. To this day in Argentina and Uruguay, in Eurasia and a lot of parts of the world, we’re still shooting lead shot. It is the boom, it is the magic, because it’s got a good weight density, it throws a great pattern, and it’s got energy and it’s malleable. When it hits, it begins to mushroom, like you’re talking about those rifle projectiles, and transfer energy in that hydro shock formula. And it works, to me. But I’m just curious, did you establish lead as a baseline of sorts?

Joel Strickland: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t necessarily establish it as a baseline for everything we did. I did shoot some just because I was very curious to see what the differences was. It definitely has a longer shot string. It’s similar to bismuth. What we get in ballistic gel was a little bit better than bismuth, but not a lot. Certainly better than steel shot, not as good as TSS. I think too, and I think you could appreciate this as well, we all look back and we have these fond memories of shooting ducks with lead shot. And there’s no doubt that it was fantastic compared to the steel shot that we had to start shooting. It was horrible. I think everybody that shot very much at all would agree with those first three or four or five years, it was just very frustrating to shoot at a duck. You see you’re hitting it, feathers go flying, the bird keeps flying. The lead probably was still not, or the ammunition and the components in the ammunition are so much more advanced today. What we’re looking at today is not an equal comparison to what we shot in 1985. The components of the shot cups, and the hulls and all of that, it’s all very different. Now the capabilities of a lot of the ammunition companies is they can create their own wads specific to a particular type of load that they’re doing. They mix different types of powders to do certain things based on the weight. It blows my mind. I’ve visited with many of the manufacturers that monkey around with all this stuff, and it just blows my mind. They didn’t do that stuff back then. There were certainly some recipes that they were doing, but not to the extent that we have today. When we shot in slow-mo, it’s amazing how many different crimps, the way that they put the ammunition together, and spacers and things like that inside, all the components inside the different types of ammo. Then to see the way that the ammo exits the barrel of the gun, and the way that the wads open. Some of them open up immediately and some of them hold the ammo for three or four or five feet before they open up. All of that stuff. Because I don’t have ammo that you could even trust that’s 40 years old, you wouldn’t be able to test it today. But I question that. We have these rose-colored memories of what things were. But today, I think we are certainly in the heyday. Even though we have steel shot still, that is by and large the most popular ammunition to use, I still think we have so many more options of using great ammo. And I think a lot of it is better than what we used to shoot with lead.

“We spend so much time and money giving ourselves the opportunity to pull the trigger. And it all comes down to that crucial trigger pull connecting us to that duck we put on our supper table or on the wall, either one.”

Ramsey Russell: Good point. Let’s wrap this up, Joel. We’re not telling anybody to go buy a new shotgun. Hardly anybody, certainly not myself, can afford to go buy 35 or 40 aftermarket chokes and run the rigorous tests that you did. You’ve got an extensive shotgun series that everybody that’s truly interested in perfecting their trigger pulls should go spend some time and watch from start to finish. This series is amazing. Kudos to not only doing really great research, Joel, but to presenting it. For example, you talk about the shot cups. You actually watch a segment where you’ve got a really nice, you depict that greatly. But let’s wrap this up on how the listener can now take their shotgun and go out and get the most out of their trigger pull. What do I need? What’s the take-home message of this to where anybody listening, no matter what make, model and serial number shotgun they’re shooting, their price point, or their personal preference for steel versus tungsten versus bismuth, how can I put this conversation to ultimate use to perfect my trigger pull?

Joel Strickland: The bottom line is you need to take the ammo that you want to use or the ammo that you’ve been using, and your shotgun and your choke tubes, and get some butcher paper, get some old wrapping paper or something, and put it up about a 40-inch square. Put a little circle dot right in the middle and shoot that, and then draw a circle around your pattern. Your pattern may not be exactly centered because you might pull it left or right. That’s why you draw the circle after you shoot it. And then count your pellets. What I would also challenge you to do is know how many pellets are in your load before you start. So that means cut open one and count them, or ask the manufacturer what’s supposed to be in that load. Then you know, how many pellets are hitting the target and how many pellets are actually in your circle. At that point, you can then start changing up your other chokes and see what happens at different distances. A lot of guys want to go the traditional way of shooting at 40 yards. I say shoot at the distance that you’re hunting. If you know that you’re going to be shooting at 20 or 25 yards right over the top of the decoys, then you need to know what your gun’s doing at that distance. If that your last decoy is 40 yards and you might shoot that far, then you need to shoot at that distance as well and test all of your different ammo, test all of your different choke tubes to know exactly what it’s doing, to know if a modified really is a modified, and to know if you just need to go start over and buy a new choke.

Ramsey Russell: Right. Fantastic advice, Joel. Thank you very much for today. Tell everybody how they can connect with you, Joel.

Joel Strickland: Surviving Duck Season is on YouTube. You can just search Surviving Duck Season. You can find my channel. I’ve got different types of content categorized, including the shotgun series. There’s 10 episodes. I challenge you to start at the first one and watch them all the way through, because what you learn kind of builds on each video as you go through, and we’re going to be adding more to it.

“We spend so much time and money giving ourselves the opportunity to pull the trigger. And it all comes down to that crucial trigger pull connecting us to that duck we put on our supper table or on the wall, either one.”

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Thank you very much, Joel. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. You’ve been listening to my buddy Joel Strickland, Surviving Duck Season. We’ve been talking about the shotgun series. We spend so much time and money giving ourselves the opportunity to pull the trigger. And it all comes down to that crucial trigger pull connecting us to that duck we put on our supper table or on the wall, either one. Go and do a little research. Go and take a look at this series. Go and shoot paper during the off-season, because trust me, and Joel both, you’ll be glad you did. See you next time.