Hydrostatic Shock — More Distance Traveled

A mentor of mine on the subject of outdoor writing told me what his mentor told him: save everything you write for 8 years, and you will never have to write an original piece after that. You will spend the rest of your career re-purposing the first 8 years.

Then again, my grandfather told me that when a man started to repeat himself, you pretty much knew that he had given you all he knew on the subject.

Go figure.

Anyhow. I vaguely remembered this topic, and I dug around a bit on the weblog. Viola! (How does she keep showing up?)

Distance Traveled

Just so you know my stand on this hydrostatic shock thing, I used to vaporize groundhogs with a 30-06 loaded with Remington Accelerators. The same load would turn a capped 2-liter bottle of water into a 10-yard cloud of mist at 100 yards. You would think, based on that, I would be a huge fan of hydrostatic shock.

I have spent the last 30+ years putting holes in whitetail deer. That has taught me at least two things. Deer are not groundhogs and they are not capped 2-liter bottles. Furthermore, a 180 grain bullet through a 2-liter at that range produced a hole in and a hole out and water leaking out of the holes– nothing more.

What are the mechanics at work? I do not know, but I do know that the same shot at the same distance on the same sized deer will have radically different effects. One deer drops over dead. The next one runs off 50 yards. Another goes back to eating. There is something going on that I do not understand and I have never seen sufficiently explained.

I remember back in high school, our physics teacher taking us through the equations that led to E=MC^2. I was trying to express my wonderment to a college physics professor, a friend of my grandfather. The old coot told me that Einstein was a fool and the Universe stopped at Newton. He emphasized his point by summarizing and repeating his arguments.

I realized I now knew exactly how much he knew on the subject. However, if you have been reading this weblog for a while you probably realize that I have told this story before. Therefore this entire post is self-referential and-

. . .and with that, a small rift in the fabric of Space/Time opens up and the shaman is sucked into the resulting vortex. For a moment, nothing remains except his headdress, but then with a wet popping noise (similar to a whitetail deer being hit with a Remington 180 grain PSPCL) the headdress too disappears.

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