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  • David Petersen
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      Post count: 2749
      in reply to: Great Coues Hunts #30738

      David, I had really come to love that hunt, after several years in a row, with three trips down and five weeks total one great year! But this year, like last, I must live it vicariously through your photos and stories. Part of the problem is lack of money. Another part is aging, I guess; where most of my life I absolutely cherished and preferred being alone, and still am fine alone in camp, the two 12-hours drives there and back, well, I get tired of singing to myself. Folks who have never hunted Coues, even experienced eastern whitetail hunters, can’t fully appreciate the incredible spookiness of these little desert ghosts. To have even small bucks, or does, close to you while on the ground is almost miraculous. Their keenness as an adversary in the hunting game more than makes up for their size. And they eat great! Best luck and keep us with you, please.

      David Petersen
      Member
        Post count: 2749
        in reply to: Economist article #28513

        Bruce, I agree on the overall worth of the presentation and venue outweighing the shortcomings.

        And I LOVE your Feynman quote!

        David Petersen
        Member
          Post count: 2749
          in reply to: Economist article #28463

          A friend sent me this Economist article a few days ago, which I, like brother Bruce, thought might be of some interest here. But I didn’t post the link precisely because I have strongly mixed feelings about it. As too often happens, the uninitiated journalist was on the right track but wound up following the wrong hounds, thus treed the wrong coon.

          Beyond that, the reactions posted in this thread so far, once again, give me hope for hunting. We will never make any real progress, or deserve to, until we wise up enough to quit supporting self-proclaimed “hunters” groups like NRA (which gains support by fear-mongering) and Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife (representing the billionaires Fallguy refers to) based on their claims and lies. Same with the pols we give our votes to. To get atop the game, we must wise up and start supporting or working against “hunter’s” groups and politicians based on what they DO, not what they say. We must judge them by their actions and alliances, not their promises and claims. Same goes for ourselves, of course. 😆

          David Petersen
          Member
            Post count: 2749

            Hey, we can’t fully love others unless we love ourselves. 😀 Truly professional, that is artful, work. Congrats.

            David Petersen
            Member
              Post count: 2749

              Skinner — Forgive me if this is old news, but since your head did come off the adapter … another current thread in this forum recently was discussing the best metal-to metal glues to attach heads to adapters and I thought, but didn’t post to say, that if you don’t do a dandy job of cleaning both the male and female parts with acetone or alcohol, it doesn’t matter what kind of glue you use because you’ll still have an oily bond that likely will fail. Like most else in life I learned this the long, slow, painful personal way. With clean parts I’ve never had any glue fail, including heat-melt which is my favorite since I sometimes want to change insert weights. Congrats on the cow. I’m eating cow meat too this year, in fact in about half an hour with dinner. 😀

              David Petersen
              Member
                Post count: 2749

                That’s yet another good point, Ed, that I had overlooked all these years. Most experienced bowhunters have had deer, and in my case elk, just jump, maybe run a few steps, then return to eating or what they were doing for a few seconds before collapsing dead. Now that I think of it, all such instances I’ve experienced have been pass-throughs. Perhaps they are aware of the weight of an arrow still in them and panic. Or perhaps a pass-through, which indicates a good arrow setup and very sharp head, is painless, which sure seems the case given the evidence. Another great reason to do all we can to design an arrow and learn to sharpen broadheads so that we can maximize the percentage of pass-through shots. We could say a 65# bow with 700 grain arrow and EFOC is “overkill” for a little whitetail doe. But what is “overkill” when it puts ’em on the ground in sight!!! Sure we can get by with less for most deer situations, which I’ve owned up to before. But why risk it? Better to have an “overkilled” animal on the ground in front of you than an exception to the “get by with less” optimism long gone and never found. Another glory of heavy arrows, the right sharp head and EFOC is that you don’t need 65# to get the same results. Congrats, Jans!

                David Petersen
                Member
                  Post count: 2749

                  Another vote for Kalamazoo!!! There is no substitute for comparative bow testing before you buy, and you feel like a king with a harem there, free to try out one bow after another and more bows than you can likely get around to through the weekend. The one you fall for could be one you’ve never even heard of before. 😀

                  David Petersen
                  Member
                    Post count: 2749

                    Same here, Ralph. Even if I’m going out for “just a morning hunt,” I always have two LED headlamps and xtra batteries in my hunt pack. Light is part of what I think of as “success gear,” along with knives, game bags, etc. I am never without a flashlight … I just go out of my way not to use them until I have meat on the ground and the hunt is over. Years ago I tried those chemical “luminescence” sticks. They sucked. Using a red lens to walk in is a good idea, I think. It definitely cuts down on brightness and glare … yet animals can still see the light and movement, so it’s not invisible. My game cams are infrared and when the flash fires, a little red light blinks. I have too many pictures of animals–elk, deer, bears–walking right up to the cams at night to check out those lights to believe they can’t see them, and I sure can. I have pics of mountain lions staring at them as well. Since deer can’t see red, what color are they seeing? It’s still a good compromise with using a full-on light if you get stuck out late.

                    David Petersen
                    Member
                      Post count: 2749

                      I’m with Steve. Not only do I leave early enough to sneak-hunt out of at least the core hunting area before I need artificial light, I can’t count the times in recent years that I’ve heard elk coming, realized the likely outcomes–a herd comes in to drink and hangs around for several minutes, with animals wandering all around so that the chances of getting busted are very high, the chances of getting a clean shot in low light in a herd very low, and I’ve been pinned down in this way for as long as 45 minutes after black dark. To avoid all that I run away at what in other circumstances or my early days of elking would be prime time. In the old days I’ve shot elk right at last light, waited the obligatory hour or so, then spent half the night walking around trying to find them by flashlight. Once I even walked two miles down to the cabin, got there about 11 p.m., got a big Coleman lantern and fresh flashlight batteries and walked back up and still never found the animal. In my experience it’s both the ethical as well as practical thing to quit evening hunts at the point where you know if you shoot anything you’ll be looking for it in the dark by flashlight. Even since I’ve adopted the Ashby arrow system and most of my elk go down well within sight–the last two made it 15 and 25 yards respectively, I still quit early. And mornings, I don’t enter the core hunting area until I can see without a flashlight, and I hunt my way in. Whether it’s accrued wisdom or the timidity of age, the years and hard learning experiences account for these conservative strategies. Also, I absolutely detest the hi-tech militarization of hunting gear and wish all electronics were outlawed. It’s just awful for the sport, IMHO.

                      David Petersen
                      Member
                        Post count: 2749

                        What Steve is describing, Plain Jane, is generally called a Hill-style longbow, and shooting one well is a steep transition from a recurve. In common usage today, “longbow” simply means it’s not a recurve. My first longbow was a Hill style, a Robertson, and I just never did get to where I could shoot it well. I also lost some shot ops due to its length, 62″. So I sold it and returned to the recurve until the hybrid r/d short longbows became perfected and widely available and I switched to that style and have never looked back. My absolute favorites have been the sweet little bows built by Gregg Coffey, Java Man Bows today, and formerly Shrew. they have a handle that’s halfway between the sculpted recurve and the flat longbow, so it’s an easy transition, almost automatic. That said, I shoot quite well with homemade wood straight longbows. I don’t know why I could never shoot the Robertson.

                        David Petersen
                        Member
                          Post count: 2749
                          in reply to: resolution #24917

                          I looked the ranch up and it is just a Texas-style canned shoot operation. Exotics are planted and you pay per animal you shoot. Ethically and realistically, it’s impossible to kill a trophy animal under such false hunting conditions, no matter how big. The guys above are telling you true. Pay-to- play operations are for incompetents and losers. As a Navy/Marine corpsman, you clearly are not among that bunch. Lots of deer along the road up to Saddleback Mtn., public land not far north of you. There were no feral hogs there when I was stationed there, but that was a long time ago. Just go hunting, have fun, and the “trophies” will come in time.

                          David Petersen
                          Member
                            Post count: 2749
                            in reply to: KME sharpener #20288

                            Doug, Gregg’s wait list is 8 months, from time of initial order. From the time he actually starts building your bow, I think two weeks is about right, if not interrupted by further acts of God. Well worth the wait!

                            David Petersen
                            Member
                              Post count: 2749
                              in reply to: KME sharpener #19551

                              Doug — I use the KME knife sharpener for broadheads, but can second DocNock that the new coarse KME stones are the ticket for taking off lots of metal fast–almost as aggressive as a mill-cut file. I have both steel/diamond and stone. But I must add that a growing number of top broadheads today come precisely beveled and professionally and truly sharpened, absolutely hunt-ready, making that readiness a major purchase consideration for me, especially since coarse cutting to try and get the bevel angles where you want them and everything shaving sharp, can leave you with head weights all over the map; not great for tuning and accuracy. Start with a wise broadhead choice and, until you bang ’em up in use, your sharpening worries are reduced to merely light touch-up.

                              Did you order your new bow yet? If so, what length, draw weight, and wood choice did you get, and how long is Gregg saying the wait is now?

                              David Petersen
                              Member
                              Member
                                Post count: 2749

                                Welcome, twitch! For a long time SWF was pretty much based in AK, back when that state had a notorious gov. They were very active in the push to eliminate wolves and bears, including grizzly, from entire areas in hopes of producing more moose and elk calves to attract more hunters from the lower 48. More recently, they led the charge to have ownership of wildlife on Indian reservations in AK transferred to the tribes so that the tribes could then sell hunts according to their own desire, outside the realm of professional wildlife management. That one failed but demonstrates what SWF is really after–privatization of wildlife to benefit the rich. They are out to totally destroy the US Model. So far as their public “good works” front, SCI has long done the same and tries to pass themselves off as a conservation group. Yep, and I am Snow White. I’d like to BHA add open battle with these rich punks to it’s frontline causes, along with fighting against ATV abuse and other cancers to our wild public hunting and fishing lands. More politically active members would help.

                                Keep up your good fights back East, ColMike!

                                David Petersen
                                Member
                                Member
                                  Post count: 2749

                                  Tragically– right on, gentlemen. Among the greatest enemies of the N.A. Model–that is, the American tradition of democratic-access hunting on public lands, in no particular order, are:

                                  1. Private ranchers running their private inventory on public wildlife lands at welfare rates, stripping forage and eroding habitat for wildlife while also putting in “ranch” roads and fragmenting habitat with fences … and who buys their beef? Exports and Us.

                                  2. Private energy industries–oil, gas and good old-fashioned hard-rock mining–doing rape and run development, displacing more wildlife by fragmenting and poisoning habitat, and again, gouging in new roads, all for private profit … and who uses that gas and oil and minerals? Exports and Us.

                                  3. Ill-planned clear-cut logging, with its thousands of miles of roads and the habitat massive fragmentation and erosion and run-off they bring (note that all these negative impacts on the landscape also negatively impact not only wildlife habitat, but aquatic, aka fishing habitat and watersheds that supply drinking water to towns) … And who uses the lumber? Exports and Us.

                                  4. The motorized wreckreation that takes full advantage of all these thousands of miles of back roads, further magnifying the negative impacts of all the extractive industries. And who benefits from motorized wreckreation on public lands? The motorized industry and the motorheads. Definitely not Us.

                                  Now where is the “government conspiracy” in any of this? There definitely is government collusion with all these private evils, and agency mismanagement of the same privateers … insofar as they roll over like puppies and refuse to stick their fingers into all the holes in the dike gouged by all these private forces from doing the damage they do.

                                  Like Daddy used to say, “There are two kinds of SOBS: SOBS and lying SOBS.” The lie-named “Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife” and their sister group “Wildlife Forever,” with whom RMEF has teamed, are both kinds of SOBS. As Don and others have laid out here and elsewhere, such bogus “sportsmen” groups are the single biggest threat to traditional hunting in America today. And “they” too often are “us.”

                                  And let’s not forget what is fueling all those extractive uses above … again, US. Overpopulation and over-consumption drive it all. And are we going to curtail ourselves in order to help ourselves? I’m not holding my breath. Merry Christmas …

                                Viewing 15 posts - 331 through 345 (of 2,570 total)