Jump to content

686

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    1231
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by 686

  1. My dad texted me that he saw 7 pigs and a nice 10 point around my blind this morning. Figures a bunch of shooters would come out Christmas morning. Hopefully I’ll get some time this week to do some hunting. Need one more deer for the freezer and a pig would be a nice bonus.
  2. Nice! What glass you thinking?
  3. Though a friend, got this Army officer out for his first deer hunt and first deer this weekend. He shot very well and put this doe down in bang-flop fashion. Wanted to learn cleaning/butchering and was all-in. He’s been shopping/getting educated on hunting rifles and was asking me about Winchesters, Remingtons, etc. and I was spewing lots of information. I had a lot of my guns out for him to target shoot before we hunted, and he finally asked an honest question “I hear you saying Weatherby a lot, I’ve never heard of that name, why do you have so much Weatherby stuff?” The most direct response I could come up with is “Because I’m a gun snob.” Haha. But then it was great to say yeah, this rifle cost $2000, and it doesn’t necessarily shoot better than lower cost imports, but its made by Americans with best quality components and design features that matter to me, and the cost premium is irrelevant to me in the long run. I saw a little glimmer of pride in his eye, pretty great.
  4. Pulled a camera card, this is probably the buck I was looking at today, hopefully get a look at him tomorrow
  5. Well I had a nice plan for today that went sideways. I was going to plant some more trees and do a little hunting, but dad got the bobcat stuck this morning in a spot where it’s in the way of a fence crew that’s building a new fence for us. And he was heading to the airport for a flight this morning so I got the stuck machine situation dumped on me solo. Took two hours to get the old backhoe started and in position and another two hours to dig and pull it out. Ass whip. Watched some deer from the house while I had a little dinner; saw two 3-yr olds fight hard for a solid minute and saw a nice 10pt really late; didn’t have enough light to really judge him, may be a shooter.
  6. This is an old blind out at our place. Guessing ~40’s vintage maybe hauled out to the place in the 60’s and abandoned in the 80’s or so. A solid 30+ years of new growth cedar thicket surrounds it. I found it tracking a deer.
  7. @CHIEF in the first pic he looks 5 easy, in the second pic looks 4; tough call. I usually let them walk too.
  8. That’s cool, always great to put your hands on a deer you’ve been watching for a long time. It will be really interesting to see his teeth. Seeing progressions over the years are great. This was a buck we had a few years ago that showed up on cameras a lot:
  9. Great buck and nice guiding! Are you aging off teeth or do you know this buck?
  10. It autocorrected my spelling to that; doesn’t look correct to me either.
  11. He’s not insane, just weak and manipulable. Holmes is a psychopath (literally). Psychopaths can be incredibly attentive and can make their targets “feel like the only person in the world”. I’m sure she was sucking his dick / turning tricks / fawning all over him and being attentive to every little detail like her life depended on it; because it kind of does and she has no soul or moral compass.
  12. Got my 10 yr old on her first deer this morning. She spined it, I needed to put a follow up on it but no worries. Saw two coyotes but they were gone before I could get my rifle on one. Saw a half dozen young bucks, one 4.5-5.5 yr old buck that would make antler restrictions but I’m still holding out for a look at the big 10. 33 degrees in Lampasas this morning
  13. Sat in the blind with my oldest yesterday morning, she took a shot at a doe but missed. Sophomore slump maybe. She’d been on the rifle for a solid 10-15 minutes waiting for this doe to clear the brush/barbed wire so I know some fatigue was a factor. Went and bought some trees to plant where we lost some of the big cedars. We have oak wilt and the best tree I’ve found that will survive without supplemental water on our place (other than live oak) is cedar elm. Definitely not as attractive as live oak, but it will get us down the road 30 years and then maybe there will be a live oak cultivar immune to oak wilt and my grandkids can re-forest more of the place with them. A good nursery had some big elms, got one installed yesterday and two today. Blew the shaft seal in the auger drive right as I was finishing the third hole, I’m sure that will be expensive. Have any of you east Texas guys tried Dunstan Chestnut trees? I have a low area that has deeper soil and pretty consistent moisture where I’m tempted to try some. http:// https://chestnuthilloutdoors.com/learning-center/dunstan-chestnut/ Got to watch some deer as I was finishing up which was nice. Saw a 3 yr old 8 point and a bunch of does. My dad said he saw the big 10 up by the house this morning, hopefully I can get a closer look at him next weekend. Had an epic sunset tonight.
  14. Thanks. 67mph peak wind on our weather station
  15. Had a little twister go through my folk’s Lampasas place this morning, lots of small hail as well. Several big trees down close to the house, one tower blind destroyed, and the roof peeled back on a second tower. No damage to the house or barn we’ve seen yet. Lightning blew up a power pole at the road and we didn’t have power for about 8 hours. Back to normal now, but lots of clean up once the mud dries up. Last weekend after my oldest shot her doe I got my food plots planted, and we’ve gotten about 2” of rain this week which was great. Saw a nice 10 point this evening running a doe while we were driving around in the mule checking feeders and blinds. Almost talked myself into pulling the trigger on him. Would probably have been the highest scoring buck we’ve shot on this place. Cell phone pic from -150 yards:
  16. Got my 12 yr old daughter on her first deer yesterday. We sat the morning looking for does or pigs. Had a pig really early, but not enough light to shoot, then saw four bucks over the next two hours, but no does, which is weird as we have a lot of does. Anyway, we head back to the house at around 9:30, and on the way we see some does. She wants to try for one, so we stop the mule, hop out and put a little stalk on. I’m constantly telling her to go slower and make every step quiet. We get to a fence gate that is a good spot to watch from and rest the rifle on, but the does start moving out. About the 4th candidate for a shot finally stands still watching us for too long. She was quartering on hard to us, but I had gone over shot placement with the kiddo in the blind and just told her to aim halfway up the body inside the shoulder. It was at least a 100 yard shot, maybe 120. We talked through squeezing the trigger slowly, and as she was lining up the shot, I knew the safety was on, but I wanted to watch her trigger pull/flinch to gauge if we needed to calm down and reset, as she was breathing hard. There was zero flinch as she realized the trigger pull wasn’t resulting in a shot and the safety must be on. Very cool, made me feel like we had a good chance at a clean kill. She slid the safety off, re-lined up and put a shot on the doe. I heard the hit and saw the on-side shoulder malfunctioning as the doe spun, and she was down in ~40 yards. Kiddo was stoked. I mean like really stoked. “I am achieving things!!!” Lol It was great. Later she asked me if I noticed her breathing hard before the shot and I said yes, and she said it was because she was tiring of standing on her toes to get the rifle lined up. (The top rail of the gate was a little too high of a rifle rest) Buck fever was evidently not a factor. She had only shot this rifle (300 BLK) off a heavy tripod with subsonics, and I had put in some supers for hunting and now wasn’t using a tripod. I was hoping she wouldn’t notice any difference with the changes and I didn’t mention them as I didn’t want her distracted. Worked great. She really wanted to make it happen, and she did.
  17. Great write up @Spaulding Smails , thanks for sharing and great pics! That was a nice bull your partner got! Sucks about your scope - what cartridge and scope are you shooting if you don’t mind? Do you think your elevation turret could have been turned a full revolution and you didn’t notice? That, or leaving the scope dialed up for some potential shot and forgetting to turn it back to zero is a fear of mine.
  18. Jerky from last year’s elk eaten earlier this week while elk hunting. Didn’t get a shot at an elk this season, so having to figure out an alternate wild game meat plan this year. Also brought elk steaks and sausage up and they were great; but was too hungry to think of taking pics before consuming.
  19. I sat at that spot for 12 hours so I had plenty of time to work on the composition and wait for the light to get just right for my palate. I grew up watching Bob Ross so maybe he rubbed off on me a little. The weather here has been great for photos but bad for hunting. Too hot and no snow. We threw everything at it today, hiked/stalked over 10 miles, 2000’ elevation gain from 8500 to 10500 and back, glassed thousands of acres and no elk. Didn’t hear a shot all day. The elk are just hunkered down. Bummed about that but still a great trip. Thank the Lord my leg held up (torn calf injury still healing) and didn’t leave me stranded anywhere. Had 15 hen turkeys feed up this valley to within 20 yards of me at this first spot while I watched a grey fox catch mice and play with/eat them for an hour. She would take the mice out of the tall grass to a big rock and let them go, catch them again and then eat. She was playing. I’ll never forget that. The turkeys let the fox get within ~30 yards with no concern, I was very surprised. Aspens on old logging trail at 9500’: Sunset at 10,000’; logging trail through rockslide: Thanks for everyone’s kind words on the photos. Hunters see some amazing things that most other folks will never experience. I like trying to capture that to share.
  20. That’s terrible but wow could have been so much worse. Glad everybody made it out alive.
  21. Well, bad luck today again. On my way into the spot I wanted to hunt today I spooked a good size herd that was bedded maybe 30 yards off the trail. It was too dark to see them but it was a good number of elk, lots of noise as they got up and got out. There wasn’t a way to pursue them through the thick timber and private land was only a mile or so the direction they headed, so I waited at my spot, a nice meadow up the hill from where they were bedded, but no luck. Another beautiful day 8000’ above my typical rat race. Taking a nap in the mountains after a backpack lunch out of cell service is best nap possible.
  22. I’ve heard him talk about it and I think it was in a book I read about Boone. Also there is a roadside historical monument by a settler’s cabin site close to Junction that talks about how they ate bears in lieu of pork there as well.
  23. Saw a cow and her calf today but no bulls. Didn’t hear a single rifle shot today, so something had the elk hunkered down. Hitting it again early in the morning, two days left to the season.
  24. Got into the elk this evening. My hunting partner put down a spike for his first bull ever, so that was great. I saw 4 spikes and a herd of cows/calves, but no big bulls. We saw a trophy mulie buck as well. Beautiful evening.
×
×
  • Create New...