I promised you a paragraph about recoil pads, so here goes. I am not very recoil-sensitive. My large heavy rifle for Africa is a .416 Rigby. It has somewhere around 54 ft. /lbs. of recoil and it really does not bother me. The 20-gauge Beretta I will be shooting with in Argentina has between 15 ft. /lbs. and 17 ft. / lbs. – so why should I be worried? While I may shoot the .416 a half dozen to a dozen times over a 10-day hunt, I will probably be shooting the 20 gauge 2000 times over four days. That is 640 ft. /lbs. of recoil over 10 days, 64 per day for the .416 and 34,000 ft. /lbs. over four days, or 8,500 per day for the 20 gauge. It is readily evident that my shoulder will take more abuse from the 20 gauge. What is the solution? I am glad you asked. I am going with something new to me for this trip. Rather than the traditional recoil pad added to the butt stock or my shoulder, I am using the EVO shooting system. The system is made up of two components. The first is a tight-fitting, wicking T-shirt with a pocket sewn into the shoulder on your shooting side. Into this pocket goes a pad. The difference is this pad goes in malleable and you mount your shotgun in a particular pattern while the pad sets up and hardens. When you are finished, you are left with a pad that custom fits your shoulder on the back and has a pocket molded by the butt of the gun on the other. This helps make sure you have a good gun mount and the recoil is spread out over about six to ten times the surface area when compared to a normal shooting situation. I have not tried it with a 20 gauge yet, but I have with my 28 Gauge. If I had not heard a boom, I would not have known my O/U had discharged. The difference was that noticeable. I’ll let you know how it worked when I get back from the dove fields of Argentina.
Tomorrow: Prepaying
