Success In The Field

I was one of the lucky ones. My dad was a hunter and started taking me hunting at the ripe young age of five. I killed my first deer at the age of seven. My dad worked two jobs for as long as I can remember. Working 14–16-hour days was the norm. My mom stayed home with us kids. We didn’t know it, but we were barely scraping by. He didn’t have the money for a deer lease most years, so my hunting was sparse and intermittent until he saved up enough money to buy a nice tract of land when I was in college. When we did go hunting, it was always a meat hunt. You shot the first buck that walked by your homemade ladder stand. We didn’t have corn feeders, protein feeders, or cottonseed. That cost too much money back then.

I always loved opening morning in…

It was a long season this year-late Feb. thru late Sept. Deer season is still on going-crop damage, doe seasons, buck season.

Groundgogs/rockchucks are just plain fun to hunt. Get to use multiple guns- .223 Contender, .22-250 XPR, 6mm AI Encore, .250 Sav. AI XP, .308 HS, .475 Linebaugh, Taurus Raging Bull .41 Mag, SSK Ruger MKIII suppressed. Plus, I don't have to clean them!

In the old days I took over 500 WV groundhogs 7 years in a row, best year 636. Now somebody has killed all the WV groundhogs?? I have to go to ID for rockchucks. This year I only got 133 WV 'hogs, but did 270 ID chucks. That makes this year's total 403. Definitely not like the old days. Makes my lifetime total 16,555 of these critters. That's a number that's nothing to sneeze about and one I'm very proud of.

Top 4 guns …

The first deer season of the year opened for me on Saturday, and I decided this would be a great time to take the 5 inch Pre-27 S&W I took in on trade a few weeks back out for a little test run. A vintage gun, and memories of Skeeter Skeltons fondness for this classic weapon were too good to pass up!

Last time I hunted deer with my personal 5 inch M27 I used the classic Skeeter load featuring the 358156 at about 1400 fps. This bullet/load has proven itself plenty of times over the years and I was tempted to take it again, but there are betters way to skin the cat these days. I had a batch of ammo loaded up with the MP Molds 359640 cast with the large HP pin and an 80/20 alloy of wheelweight/lead. These were powder coated and annealed and a load…

After tagging my bear on the first evening of the HHI bear hunt, I found myself with 4 days to relax. With the other hunters headed out to the bear baits, I had the cabin to myself. I got restless after about 30 minutes.

There are several locations that offer Red Deer hunts in the state of Maine. One of them is two hours away from our bear hunting location. I called and booked a hind hunt for the next afternoon .

I used my 454 and 260 Federal Fusions to take this big girl. One hurried and slightly misplaced shot at 40 yards and then another perfectly placed shot at 90 yards put her in the cooler.