Editor’s Note: Terry Oertwig, a member of the CVA Pro Staff Team, took the trip of a lifetime to Africa. The only gun he carried with him was the CVA Electra. Oertwig liked the light weight of the gun, the accuracy of the Electra out to 300 yards and the fact that he diOertwig liked the light weight of the gun, the accuracy of the Electra out to 300 yards and the fact that he didn’t have to take primers through the airport.dn’t have to take primers through the airport. “I wanted a dependable rifle that was extremely accurate for this hunt of a lifetime, and I had faith in the Electra,” Oertwig says.
One of the most-elusive animals I hunted in Africa was the gemsbok. When we first spotted a gemsbok, we had to first of all determine which way the wind was blowing, and then circle the animal to get the wind in our favor to make our stalk. While we were trying to approach the gemsbok, we spotted three wildebeests sleeping in a small hole in the ground. The guide saw them first and then motioned for us to back-up and skirt-around the wildebeests in hopes that we wouldn’t spook them. We knew if we did that they would spook the gemsbok. As we tried to get around the wildebeests, the wind changed, and the wildebeests smelled us. They jumped up and ran away from us and past the gemsbok. The gemsbok started watching the wildebeests trying to determine what had spooked them. As the gemsbok became more curious, he walked out of the bush where he had been standing and turned broadside at about 60 yards. Totally unaware of our presence, he kept watching the wildebeests. I had my shooting sticks with me, because we knew we would have to crawl to get as close as we could to the gemsbok. I rested my Electra on my shooting sticks and aimed through the scope. Once I squeezed the trigger, the animal dropped in his tracks. Because the wind was blowing to us, the burnt powder coming out of the barrel blew into my face after the shot, and I couldn’t tell what had happened. But my tracker and my guide were jumping up and down and saying, “He dropped in his tracks!” The average gemsbok generally weighs between 600 and 700 pounds. My guide was really impressed that the CVA Electra had delivered that much knock-down power.
That night when I returned to camp, I simply cleaned the bore of the Electra and brushed the prongs on the electronic-ignition system. However, I didn’t have to take the breech plug out and give the rifle a thorough cleaning, which was one of the advantages of the Electra. The Electra burns the powder so cleanly that you only need half the amount of time and half the number of patches to clean it as you do a conventional inline rifle that uses a cap for a primer. Each day I’d take a wet patch, swab it down the barrel, turn the patch over swab it down the barrel again and then take a dry patch and go down the barrel and back. Then my Electra was clean and ready for the next day. That’s all the cleaning my Electra got for 5 days of hunting. I took six animals in Africa during 4 days. I never took the CVA muzzleloader apart and thoroughly cleaned it, until I returned home to Missouri from Africa.
You have to remember that the ignition system on the Electra ignites the powder so efficiently that the powder burns cleaner than it does in most-other blackpowder rifles. The arc that’s used to ignite the powder is about 10-times hotter than a 209 primer, and the arc doesn’t have the push that the 209 primer has. That push causes the powder to ignite as it’s moving up the barrel. Because the electrodes sit right against the powder in the Electra, you get a complete start on the bottom of your powder where the powder burns cleaner. The other advantage you have is that the Electra has a sealed breech, so there’s no hole in it. Therefore with a 26-inch barrel, I’m getting 50- to 80-feet-per-second more velocity out of the barrel than I get out of my other muzzleloading rifles that have 2-inch-longer barrels.
To learn more about African safaris and Claude and Jill Kleynhans, go to www.mafigeni.com.