The Moment is Upon You – Will Your Shot Deliver?

The bacon, coffee and camaraderie of breakfast still warming your insides as you stand on your first peg of the day, eyes aloft, gun still cold and sharply outlined against the sky as you wait for the first flurry of birds to appear.

Your thoughts are, as they should be, focussed on your quarry and not on the contents of your cartridge bag. Your cartridge choice, like your choice of gun, may have many factors contributing to it, but fundamentally you put your trust in the manufacturer having built something that will get the job done, and promptly forgotten all about it and got on with shooting.

The team at Gamebore take this responsibility seriously. Failure to perform on the game field will cause that trust to evaporate faster than the dew on your barrels after the first few shots of the day. Gamebore Director Phil Plowman's near fanatical devotion to developing the best game load possible has, after much in-house testing as well as field testing in the hands of such luminaries as George Digweed, resulted in the Black Gold Dark Storm.

Fibre wads have been something of a British obsession. Ask outside the UK aside from a couple of specific countries and you will be met with head scratching and a puzzled look. However if you, like me, love the countryside then you will be willing to put up with the reduced performance, the lumpy recoil and the confetti effect of shooting fibre wads because you know that you aren't littering every time you pull the trigger.

Gamebore decided a while ago that “putting up” with poor performance just wasn’t good enough. Building a fibre wad cartridge that can deliver the same or better performance vs a plastic wad in modern overboard barrels is a challenging target, but with the Quad Seal, the Dark Storm propels the British-made Diamond Shot up to 1500 fps by providing a highly efficient gas seal with the bore, meaning no propellant is wasted and ensuring a clean efficient burn every time.

The high brass on the cartridge not only looks good but gives cleaner ejection, especially when it matters, as the birds keep coming and your gun is growing hotter with every shot fired.

No grain of powder is wasted; all is burned efficiently in service of putting pellets downrange and providing terminal performance to kill birds cleanly, leaving only the placement of the shot up to you. Terminal performance is, of course, all we are really interested in. Most care not a jot for the physics at play in our guns when we are shooting as long as the 50-yard Pheasant you are swinging through folds and falls to earth ready for the ever-eager dogs to pick.

The Dark Storm delivers here in spades, with the High Density lead shot delivering velocity and knock-down kinetic energy where it’s needed, up where the quarry are.

The meticulous attention to detail continues long after the last note of the keepers horn echoes over the field and the guns are packed away. The Quad Seal, its primary purpose done, now has but one job remaining: to decompose and leave no unsightly trace littering the countryside.

Here again Gamebore delivers. In my personal testing, we can see that the Quad Seal is already breaking down after only 24 hours in a wet environment, with full decomposition within 30 days. You can enjoy dinner with tales of the birds taken from the day, safe in the knowledge that you are leaving the field as you found it.

Should your appetite run to the truly epic birds, stratospheric in their aspect, then Gamebore also offer the Black Gold UER, Ultimate Extended Range cartridges with the technology and the quality “turned up to 11” for when uncompromising performance is needed to reach up and take the very highest quarry.

All things considered, choosing ammo is a rather dreary chore that most of us do once a year, at the start of the season. But having the confidence that the cartridge you choose is the very best for the job leaves you, the shooter, only the job of making the memories that we all cherish into our old age.

Reminisce about more perfect shots with Gamebore.