John
I ain't preaching to you here but I do want to pass on my personal experience in the hopes that it might spare someone else the disastrous results I got from that shooting session Splendid mentioned.
Both Splendid and I had new GCC’s and he came to my house over a long 3-day weekend. We went up to a beautiful place right up under Amicalola Falls and Springer Mountain to shoot across a flat field into the dam of a large lake. It was NICE. We had lunch and a cooler of water and cokes with us. We had a bench rest, stools and chains and chronographs and everything we needed to shoot and we were in the shade of large trees. It was a damm GLORIOUS weekend with bright blue skys and light winds. Just PERFECT for shooting.
I had a custom stock on my rifle with a high comb. I also had 60 rounds of ammo I wanted to test and all of it was full hunting loads and some of it was loaded hot. I was shooting bullets from 210 to 250 grains in weight.
I shot about 30 rounds the first day and we went home and loaded up more. On the second day, my right cheek was red and it hurt like hell to shoot. On Monday, I noticed a slight “blur” in my right eye and thought nothing of it but it got worse as the day went along.
I was working for a large group of eye surgeons at the time so when I went to work Tuesday morning, I got in the chair and had the vitro-retina specialists take a look at it. He asked me if I had been in a car wreck or had been subjected to “Trauma” lately. I told him no but I had shot my rifle all weekend. (Actually I fired about 60 rounds over two days.) The doctor is an elk hunter and he used a GCC also and when I told him what I had done, he said, that will do it.
What it had done is separate the vitreous from the retina in my right eye. Now that IS NOT the same thing as a detached retina. They can fix that but once you do to your eye what I did to mine, there is no known treatment or surgical procedure to repair it.
So don’t be a dumb ass like I was. If you experience any discomfort, STOP!! That is your body trying to tell you it is being damaged. And for sure, DO NOT have a high comb on any rifle that has more recoil than about a 30-06 and even then, it’ll hurt you if you shoot 220-grain bullets like I do.
Just my 2 cents worth. BTW, John Wooter’s did the exact same thing to his right eye shooting a 45 / 70 with heavy loads and heavy bullets out of a No. 1 Ruger. It’s a pretty common injury , especially to older shooters, but it is not well publicized and it should be in my opinion.
