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I'm thinking of buying a new gun for coastal wildfowling this season. What would you go for – a 3½-inch 12-bore, or a 10-bore?
Mike says: Six years ago Sporting Gun invited wildfowlers Jack Sykes and Will Wykes to make the case for the two guns. Jack was all for a 12-bore semi-auto, while Will was devoted to his 3½-inch chambered side-by-side 10-bore, and I was asked to explain the history of the two cartridges.
Jack made the point that the ammunition for the 12-bore was cheaper than that for the 10, and he also mentioned the gun’s versatility: after a morning on the marsh you could go to your local shooting ground and shoot clays with the same gun, but with 28g ammunition.
Will said that his two
10-bores – a Reilly double hammer under-lever weighing 14lb and an Ithaca Mag-10 semi-auto weighing 11lb – were better suited to the use of heavy loads on the marsh, and recoiled much less than the 12.
That’s maybe over-simplified two very well-stated arguments, but these days I would go for Jack’s option and back the 12-bore. I’ve fired 10bore semi-auto magnums by Browning and Winchester and found the recoil reasonable on both guns, but the recoil on the big 12 is not much greater – and how many shots do you fire in a day’s goose shooting anyway?
The thing that really sells the 12-bore argument to me is that great advances in over-thecounter ammunition continue to be made, particularly in the USA, while nobody seems to be doing any work on the 10-bore.