On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:56:24 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Bruce" wrote in message
.. .
On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:11:27 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

There's a museum on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Easton? Cambridge?)
that
has three or four punt guns. They all have names, which they were given
150
years ago or so.

Have you ever been up close to one of those suckers? The barrel looks
like
the sewer pipe in my basement, only prettier. Despite the fact that the
buttstock looks like it goes against your shoulder, if you tried, your
arm
would wind up in the next county.

My limits are a Thompson Center contender in .375 JDJ or my uncles
Browning highwall
pushing a 320g bullet at 2400 fps. After that, it quits being fun. My
lightweight 338
win mag isn't that much joy either. Hot 44 mag loads in my
superblackhawk, yeah baby. I'm
still up for that! Maybe when I get older the redhawk will make more
sense if i can lift
it


Whatever perverse motive used to attract me to guns with painful recoil,
it
left me years ago.

If you haven't seen a punt gun, or how it's used, you should look it up on
Google. I'm sure they have plenty of info on them. These are guns around
which people would build a boat. d8-) The barrel rested in a padded notch
in
the bow, and a thick plank, braced with grown knees and all kinds of
reinforcement, projected up from the transom. You rested the buttstock on
this plank and hoped that firing the gun didn't rip the transom off the
punt.

They could sluice a whole flock of rafting ducks with one shot from those
things.


Actually not quite so gruesome.

Most of the punt gun boats were little more then a very light weight
single man boat. Generally they were operated with the shooter laying
prone and paddling with what looked like ping-pong paddles. When the
gun fired much of the recoil was absorbed by the boat scooting
backward. When I was a kid there was an old guy in town that had one
of the punts in his garage and either him, as a young man, or
perhaps his daddy had shot ducks for market out of it.
There is a picture of a gun punt at
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/muse...ves/003537.asp
that looks very much like my memory of the one I saw.
Cheers,

Bruce

Good grief. You call that a punt gun? That's what they call a gentleman's
fowling piece on Maryland's Eastern Shore. g

The ones they used on the Eastern Shore, in the Chesapeake tributaries and
on Sinepuxent Bay, around Crisfield and up to Baltimore, ran up to 13 feet
in length and fired a load of up to five pounds of cut shot and nails.

Here's a Maryland-style punt gun:

http://www.bluerockheritage.com/tom_...e_punt_gun.htm

And I've seen some with even bigger bores.


I'm not sure that 5 pounds of shot qualifies as a "punt gun". More
likely as a "gun" in the navel sense :-)
Cheers,

Bruce