Back From "Bonito"

awshucks · 02-24-2007, 05:09 PM

Well, I'm back, lol. Had a great time, no meat, no photo's. Didn't get a shot at a decent horned critter and lost my camera for most of the hunt, but got it back. Had one shot at a spike Sitka and passed him and a slew of various does. Here's how it went. You get woke up at 4:15 a.m. leave at 5 a.m. Takes a little over an hour to get 5 hunters to their stands. Brutal terrain is just a figment of your imagination until you get in this country. All 26 square miles of it! You hunt til about 9:30 a.m. and get picked back up. After all hunters are back and photo's taken, you have breakfast at about 11 a.m. You go back out at about 2:30 p.m. and get picked up again around dark. After all are back and photo's taken, supper is about 8-8:30 p.m.

The saga started in Fredericksburg, Tx. around noon Sunday the 18th at the Wal-Mart. I saw some folks from Alabama buying licenses and knew they were going to Rio. Turns out DJH had broke down and would meet us there later, which turned into Tue eve about mid-night. One of the three Alabama gentlemen was Claude, now in charge, and he had been there 5 years running. I was the only xbow hunter until DJH got there. There was quite an assortment of game taken, hogs, axis deer, sitkas, one weird goat, and oudad. The oudad are real hard to put down as their vitals are alot further forward than deer. Archers need a quartering away shot and ideally one needs to put the arrow in right behind one front shoulder and come out in front of off side shoulder. For this reason, I was using my Emax as I knew at 20 yds I could go thru the shoulder, having looked at a few carcasses at the skinning shed. These animals were real smart and you could watch them check the stands out from well over 100 yds away. Wed and Thurs were both real warm and nobody did much those two days. I hunted Thurs eve from my ground blind and had two different batches of feral hogs come into the feeder at 30 -35 yds. They both stayed briefly and left, just wasn't meant to be, lol. I got an extra hunt Fri am due to the fact I hadn't scored anything which was very generous of the owners. DJH had one pig and was going to hunt thru Sat due to his late arrival. As I left about noon Fri my truck electronics went nuts, couldn't turn my wipers or head lights off and my brake,turn signals were on full time both sides. Wipers quit completely, so I had to get some Rain-X and drove 500 miles w/ no turn signals or brake lights. Didn't have to worry about falling asleep at the wheel sticking my arm out for turns in a light, cold rain, lol. Got up this a.m. and believe it or not, all worked fine on the truck! I tried dis-connecting the battery and stopped at two dealers w/ no luck. Go figure!

See ya'll had fun while I was gone, lol, congrats on the new addition David, nice job on the "strings" too btw.