Sunday, January 11, 2009

Dallas Trip

Wicked, Shadow, and I went to Dallas this past weekend. We left Shadow at Pussy Tail's Friday morning and did the Dallas Safari Club had their hunting convention. I was able to get through it in less than a day this time, even though it grew. The difference was I wasn't actively looking to book a hunt. Last year I was there 2 days and didn't see it all. Here's some pix of the taxidermy:






Another reason we went was to take my PH (Mare') and his wife Elma to the Medievil Times. (http://www.medievaltimes.com/) This place has an arena where they put on a medieval show where some prince is captured, a knight from another kingdom infiltrates their show, and they must sort it out. The cool thing is they have a jousting tournament and end up swordfighting to the death. The swordfights are about as real as pro wrestling but the jousting and horsemanship are impressive. They also give demonstations on the training of their horses and another part is on falconry. (Cursed bird swooped withing a couple feet of my head.) A wench also feeds you while this is going on; dragon blood soup, 1/2 a falcon, a dragon toe, and a dragon egg. (Veg soup, chicken, BBQ rib, & a spud) It's a bit expensive and they keep trying to wring more money out of you selling trinkets, but it's worth seeing once if you're in Dallas or one of the other cities they have these in. Mare' and Elma, being from the 3rd world nation of Namibia, were quite impressed. He videotaped everything and wanted pictures with everything - total tourist. He said he was acting like I did. I hope I wasn't THAT bad!

We stayed at Tail's place Friday night and hit the Big Town gun show in Mesquite on Saturday. It was the busiest I'd ever seen it. Wicked bought 500 rounds of ammo while Tail & I somehow managed not to buy a new gun or 10K rnds of ammo each. It's good to go to these and see how the threat of the incomming dems have adjusted prices on the EBRs and hi cap mags. I was surprised that even the high-end EBRs have gone up 30-50% in the last 6 months.
We stopped at George's in Waco on the way back. Their chicken fried steak dinner is the best for 100 miles.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Whitetail Season Ends


That's a view from one of trees I hunted out of. The season ended in Williamson county on Jan 4. I probably hunted 30 times and only killed one doe. So much for deer hunting being easy...

We've got antler restrictions that really worked against me. The restriction is deer are off limits if they've got a forked antler and a spread under 13". The intention was to allow younger bucks to grow before allowing them to be killed. However in this area that means big-antlered bucks (about 2% of our deer), spike bucks, and does are legal. Few of our deer don't have the genetics to grow bigger racks, so they'll get killed while the smaller-racked deer pass on their genetics. I DID go to the TX Parks & Wildlife meeting and spoke against this but my concerns fell on deaf ears.

There were two small 4-pointers who came around regularly. Neither was afraid of me and I knew they saw me. I shot one of them 3 different times in the butt with a judo point, just out of spite. Does however were on full alert. Didn't matter if I was 25 feet up in a tree 35 yards away, full cammo'd, and motionless as a hippy when you offer them work; they busted me very time.

I only saw one legal buck all season. He walked through the front yard while I wasn't hunting but was gone before I could sneak out there.

Deer hunting ain't fair. The deer cheat.