took the SABO Sight to Dries Visser Safaris and man what a trip.
Septermber 13, 2010
VIDEO IS IN BOWHUNTING VIDEOS SECTION
For several years I had more than kicked around the idea of picking up the stick and string and heading to hunt with Dries Visser Safaris near Thabazimbi, South Africa. Each year work and life took precedence over answering the call of my ancestors. Within the last eighteen months I had gained a wife, a baby boy, a home and a second business in a short time and the axis on which my world revolved had forever shifted. I took what might be my last opportunity of short sweet time to book the hunt with Dries and make my pilgrimage to his Citadel Camp located in the Limpopo Province. The Limpopo province is to South African plains game what South Texas is to White Tail deer, an absolute paradise.
Day – 1
I awoke at 2:12 AM and lay awake ravenous until it was time to rise at 5 AM and head to breakfast, my biological clock was in complete chaos of jet lag,. All our trackers were Tswana, their original tribal domain covering both sides of the Limpopo River around South Africa and Botswana. Will and Stacy joined Stian and I as we drove about 45 minutes to a ranch known as GeoDot, a compilation of George and Dottie the owners. Will had previously hunted this property and he remembered this ranch as “The Zoo”, and what a zoo it was. The Zoo was drier than Citadel and many animals still had to visit the watering hole to receive their daily moisture. Dawn had already come and gone long before we even got near the blind. We set up shop in a spacious pit blind with one way tinted windows and Stian lit a piece of zebra dung to cover our human odor.
I was snapped out of my pregame butterflies as a dark came shuffling along through the one way windows of the pit blind. The lord of all antelope, a magnificent bull sable, colored like a heap anthracite piled upon a fresh snow drift, arrived and as the morning progressed he kept all his subjects at bay. With an aggressive toss of his huge scimitar horns, the sable effectively deterred any and all of the kudu, zebra, gemsbok, or blue wildebeest that arrived from sharing the alfalfa. Even the francolin and guinea fowl were kept on edge and they made squawking protest to the lordly sable. The hungry herds would wait for a chance and maybe take a sip from the water hole before fleeing from the sable’s deadly horns. After about two hours the novelty of this bull sable wore off as we realized we would have no other animals come within bow range. After exhausting our supply of zebra dung missiles targeted at the sable, Stian radioed for the tracker to relocate us.
We drove out through a large pasture of the ranch where the sekylbos trees had been sprayed and later burned off. It was a miniature Serengeti, the larger native trees had been left healthy and dotted the landscape. The waves of dry winter grass could not conceal the scores of game, we saw three herds of impala, several zebra, a family of warthogs and our tracker spotted a couple of nice kudu lying in the shade of a huge camelthorn tree! The sekylbos trees are an invasive species from Botswana, similar in appearance and growth rate to a huisache or mesquite, but with a density like ironwood, the fruit of these trees is spread by the animals and an ecosystem can quickly be choked out by this fast growing invasive species. George the rancher, by clearing out the invading seyklbos and leaving his large native trees increased the carrying capacity of his ranch and created a honey hole for fortunate bow hunters!
Moments later we were in a pit blind nestled in a grove a giant camelthorn trees. The wind was unfavorable and the tendrils of smoked eddied as if caught in a stream. We heard the deep throaty alarm bark of a kudu bull before we saw him. The kudu remained vigilant, and after about twenty minutes the kudu began to circle and finally came into view. From there the procession unfolded as we watched several cows, calves and young kudu bulls parade through, even one pretty nice shy bull that we had difficulty judging. This bull’s rib cage showed through his gaunt sides, his characteristic white lines were faded out and his beard was not as long or dark, nor his facial markings as crisp as the other kudu, but my did he have a set of horns.
A kudu usually tops every sportsman’s wish list and my opportunity at a mature bull was ambling slowly away. The other hunters in camp had been struggling to find their own bulls. My original game plan of taking any mature animal until my budget was filled had been foolishly disregarded. As these emotions raged through my mind a breath of wind brought a wisp of the zebra dung into the blind. The breath became a soft breeze and moments later two kudu cows shuffled in to feed.
As if fate had blown me a kiss, a younger bull paid the cows interest and that old kudu bull turned about face from out in the bush and returned with the slow confidence and intent of sorting out this lesser rival. Stian and I had our thoughts on the same page, SHOOT! For the kudu I had selected one of my camo-dipped Easton Axis ST 400 arrows, weighing slightly more than the normal bare carbon arrow, tipped with a brand new 100 grain. Rage two-blade and tailed by a green Nocturnal lighted nock. I had pre-ranged the distance at 24 yards. I suppressed the tingle of buck fever, with the same control I used when kicking clutch field goals. My draw rolled back silky smooth thanks to the combination of muscle memory and Mathews Engineering. I dialed in my twenty yard fiber optic dot in with the triangle on the lens of my trusty SABO Sight just slightly forward of the crease behind the front shoulder and held two inches lower than the mid-body line. An ox ****** was busy at his work right next to my point of impact, and luckily for the ox ******, he shifted off to safety right before I released.
The Nockturnal lit a green arcing blaze in the fiery evening light as it inched through space and impacted right on target, the impact making a sound like that of a fencepost driver dropped onto a pumpkin. Slow motion switched to the fast forward of chaos as kudu streaked in all directions. My kudu, I could say that with confidence, lurched forward and accelerated on those long graceful legs as he bounded away with my arrow buried to the fletchings and the Rage protruded out the far side from the area of the chest cavity where the heart and lungs are located. As he left my sight in could see his stumble to Earth begin as squirts of blood sprayed out his sides and then the back slapping and high fiving triggered the release of the shakes as my kudu disappeared from view. Holy smokes what a thrill!
Once the tracker and truck showed up we exited the blind to immediately have a white rhino encounter. I was in the middle of reading African Game Trails by Teddy Roosevelt, and his colorful accounts of the charging pachyderms combined with their physical hulk and horns in a prominent display at only twenty yards added yet another heart racing thrill, especially when they became agitated and started to show how truly quick they were. I have stared down and wrestled some pretty sizable wild hogs into a burlap sack, even doing so in such fashion as to be the 2007 Wild Hog Wrestling World Champion but my gosh it would take a big sack to hole those two rhinos. The larger and luckily the more docile of the two rhino species were intent on hitting the buffet of feed, water and salt until I sailed a well placed tomahawk stick from 25 yards as and effective deterrent.
Back to business, we trailed the kudu about 120 yards from his starting point while the rhinos thundered away. The kudu had fled with such haste that we only found small splashes of blood even with two huge Rage holes through his lungs and heart tissue. Sparse blood or not was of no consequence because my kudu was piled up just the same. We later found the broad head half of the arrow, the Rage still in good condition. Measurements don’t much matter to me, but Stian could not resist whipping out the tape. He had nice deep curls, his tips swept back and there were rough ridges and deep grooves covered with battle scars that added character to his horns that measured 58” and 56”! I was pumped, and I had just blown over half of my budget the first of a seven day hunt, but what a way to cash in on the kudu of a lifetime!
Septermber 13, 2010
VIDEO IS IN BOWHUNTING VIDEOS SECTION
For several years I had more than kicked around the idea of picking up the stick and string and heading to hunt with Dries Visser Safaris near Thabazimbi, South Africa. Each year work and life took precedence over answering the call of my ancestors. Within the last eighteen months I had gained a wife, a baby boy, a home and a second business in a short time and the axis on which my world revolved had forever shifted. I took what might be my last opportunity of short sweet time to book the hunt with Dries and make my pilgrimage to his Citadel Camp located in the Limpopo Province. The Limpopo province is to South African plains game what South Texas is to White Tail deer, an absolute paradise.
Day – 1
I awoke at 2:12 AM and lay awake ravenous until it was time to rise at 5 AM and head to breakfast, my biological clock was in complete chaos of jet lag,. All our trackers were Tswana, their original tribal domain covering both sides of the Limpopo River around South Africa and Botswana. Will and Stacy joined Stian and I as we drove about 45 minutes to a ranch known as GeoDot, a compilation of George and Dottie the owners. Will had previously hunted this property and he remembered this ranch as “The Zoo”, and what a zoo it was. The Zoo was drier than Citadel and many animals still had to visit the watering hole to receive their daily moisture. Dawn had already come and gone long before we even got near the blind. We set up shop in a spacious pit blind with one way tinted windows and Stian lit a piece of zebra dung to cover our human odor.
I was snapped out of my pregame butterflies as a dark came shuffling along through the one way windows of the pit blind. The lord of all antelope, a magnificent bull sable, colored like a heap anthracite piled upon a fresh snow drift, arrived and as the morning progressed he kept all his subjects at bay. With an aggressive toss of his huge scimitar horns, the sable effectively deterred any and all of the kudu, zebra, gemsbok, or blue wildebeest that arrived from sharing the alfalfa. Even the francolin and guinea fowl were kept on edge and they made squawking protest to the lordly sable. The hungry herds would wait for a chance and maybe take a sip from the water hole before fleeing from the sable’s deadly horns. After about two hours the novelty of this bull sable wore off as we realized we would have no other animals come within bow range. After exhausting our supply of zebra dung missiles targeted at the sable, Stian radioed for the tracker to relocate us.
We drove out through a large pasture of the ranch where the sekylbos trees had been sprayed and later burned off. It was a miniature Serengeti, the larger native trees had been left healthy and dotted the landscape. The waves of dry winter grass could not conceal the scores of game, we saw three herds of impala, several zebra, a family of warthogs and our tracker spotted a couple of nice kudu lying in the shade of a huge camelthorn tree! The sekylbos trees are an invasive species from Botswana, similar in appearance and growth rate to a huisache or mesquite, but with a density like ironwood, the fruit of these trees is spread by the animals and an ecosystem can quickly be choked out by this fast growing invasive species. George the rancher, by clearing out the invading seyklbos and leaving his large native trees increased the carrying capacity of his ranch and created a honey hole for fortunate bow hunters!
Moments later we were in a pit blind nestled in a grove a giant camelthorn trees. The wind was unfavorable and the tendrils of smoked eddied as if caught in a stream. We heard the deep throaty alarm bark of a kudu bull before we saw him. The kudu remained vigilant, and after about twenty minutes the kudu began to circle and finally came into view. From there the procession unfolded as we watched several cows, calves and young kudu bulls parade through, even one pretty nice shy bull that we had difficulty judging. This bull’s rib cage showed through his gaunt sides, his characteristic white lines were faded out and his beard was not as long or dark, nor his facial markings as crisp as the other kudu, but my did he have a set of horns.
A kudu usually tops every sportsman’s wish list and my opportunity at a mature bull was ambling slowly away. The other hunters in camp had been struggling to find their own bulls. My original game plan of taking any mature animal until my budget was filled had been foolishly disregarded. As these emotions raged through my mind a breath of wind brought a wisp of the zebra dung into the blind. The breath became a soft breeze and moments later two kudu cows shuffled in to feed.
As if fate had blown me a kiss, a younger bull paid the cows interest and that old kudu bull turned about face from out in the bush and returned with the slow confidence and intent of sorting out this lesser rival. Stian and I had our thoughts on the same page, SHOOT! For the kudu I had selected one of my camo-dipped Easton Axis ST 400 arrows, weighing slightly more than the normal bare carbon arrow, tipped with a brand new 100 grain. Rage two-blade and tailed by a green Nocturnal lighted nock. I had pre-ranged the distance at 24 yards. I suppressed the tingle of buck fever, with the same control I used when kicking clutch field goals. My draw rolled back silky smooth thanks to the combination of muscle memory and Mathews Engineering. I dialed in my twenty yard fiber optic dot in with the triangle on the lens of my trusty SABO Sight just slightly forward of the crease behind the front shoulder and held two inches lower than the mid-body line. An ox ****** was busy at his work right next to my point of impact, and luckily for the ox ******, he shifted off to safety right before I released.
The Nockturnal lit a green arcing blaze in the fiery evening light as it inched through space and impacted right on target, the impact making a sound like that of a fencepost driver dropped onto a pumpkin. Slow motion switched to the fast forward of chaos as kudu streaked in all directions. My kudu, I could say that with confidence, lurched forward and accelerated on those long graceful legs as he bounded away with my arrow buried to the fletchings and the Rage protruded out the far side from the area of the chest cavity where the heart and lungs are located. As he left my sight in could see his stumble to Earth begin as squirts of blood sprayed out his sides and then the back slapping and high fiving triggered the release of the shakes as my kudu disappeared from view. Holy smokes what a thrill!
Once the tracker and truck showed up we exited the blind to immediately have a white rhino encounter. I was in the middle of reading African Game Trails by Teddy Roosevelt, and his colorful accounts of the charging pachyderms combined with their physical hulk and horns in a prominent display at only twenty yards added yet another heart racing thrill, especially when they became agitated and started to show how truly quick they were. I have stared down and wrestled some pretty sizable wild hogs into a burlap sack, even doing so in such fashion as to be the 2007 Wild Hog Wrestling World Champion but my gosh it would take a big sack to hole those two rhinos. The larger and luckily the more docile of the two rhino species were intent on hitting the buffet of feed, water and salt until I sailed a well placed tomahawk stick from 25 yards as and effective deterrent.
Back to business, we trailed the kudu about 120 yards from his starting point while the rhinos thundered away. The kudu had fled with such haste that we only found small splashes of blood even with two huge Rage holes through his lungs and heart tissue. Sparse blood or not was of no consequence because my kudu was piled up just the same. We later found the broad head half of the arrow, the Rage still in good condition. Measurements don’t much matter to me, but Stian could not resist whipping out the tape. He had nice deep curls, his tips swept back and there were rough ridges and deep grooves covered with battle scars that added character to his horns that measured 58” and 56”! I was pumped, and I had just blown over half of my budget the first of a seven day hunt, but what a way to cash in on the kudu of a lifetime!
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