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Old 10-01-2018, 08:15 PM
Dean2 Dean2 is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Alberta
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The Hunt

We spent July 26 hunting doves. Nice thing about doves is you don’t need to get up real early, as long as you are out there around 0800 you are good. The morning flight lasts about 3 hours, so for a couple of guys who had spent 30 hours on a plane this was a very agreeable schedule. Between the two of us we burnt through 250 rounds in the morning.

We took a few pictures, cleaned up the empties and headed back to home base, 10 minutes, for a nice hot Brunch and then a nap. Back out around 3 for the evening flight. Much busier, went through about 400 rounds in two hours. Mark had never shot so much 12 gauge in one day in his life, and it had been many years since I had. It was tremendous fun and I would definitely do it again on another trip. It makes the perfect first day out. Lots of action, relaxed and very little exertion. There must be a Dove and Pidgeon union because at 5:01 sharp almost all activity stopped. Back to base for a couple of cold ones and supper.

When we got back for supper there were four Dane’s in camp, planning to shoot Guinea fowl and doves the next day. They had just finished 11 days of hunting and had shot over 45 animals, all of which they were having mounted and sent back to Denmark. We heard they went through 1000 shotgun shells for 85 Doves, so they were obviously much better rifle shots than scatter gunners. We stayed up quite late visiting so that may have had an effect on their shooting!

We were up the next day at 0600 for breakfast at 0630 followed by loading up and moving to our first big game camp on the Caledon River 30 minutes South east of Smithfield . It was a lovely sunny day and a leisurely 3 hour drive had us eating a great steak lunch at Buckey’s restaurant in Smithfield. The owner and his wife did the in camp catering for us the rest of our stay.

Camp food is hearty and plentiful but because eating times for lunch and supper can be highly variable a lot of what they tend to make is stew type meals. I really dislike any kind of stew. We did get to try a number of different wild game meats, the most outstanding of which was Impala ribs BBQed and in a spicy sauce and Eland Steaks. The smaller fast game tended to be stringy, no matter how young or well aged. The Waterbuck and Eland that I took were both old and well past their prime but the meat was absolutely excellent; tender, with a great flavor, very mild and not as gamey as Impala.

The other thing to be aware of is many of the great rooms in the lodges have no heat beyond a fireplace. Since you are hunting in their winter time, the rooms tend to be quite chilly. Thus your plates are ice cold and so is everything else in the room, even with the fire at full crank. Do not be afraid to ask to have your plates heated, it makes the food much better. Next time I go I will also be a lot more specific in terms of the menu items I would like to see for breakfast, lunch and supper. We eventually got it sorted at each camp, but because we were in three different camps it would have been a lot smoother to organize that up front.

This camp was of recent and modern construction. The rooms had large showers, lots of hot water and electric in floor heat. The main lodge was a large open room with a kitchen in one end, the bar in the other and a wall mounted fireplace for heat and cooking.




We hunted this location for 5 days, talking an Impala, Blue Wildebeest, Black Wildebeest, 2 Springbock, a double by my brother and I using the same rifle at 300 yards in a pretty good wind and two Blesbock. We then traveled to Brulbock Farm about 3 hours east into the very hilly, more brushy and VERY rocky wild country. There we found a very nice Impala in a howling wind at 300 yards. It used all of 9 inches of wind hold to hit him right behind the shoulder and Impala are not a very big target. We also took a Waterbock and a nice representative Impala. Stuart’s 12 year old son managed to take a real nice Black Wildebeest with a fine shot at 200 yards.

We saw a lot of game and a wide variety over the days we hunted. We saw some truly great trophy animals as well as a large number well on their way to developing into great Trophies. We talked a lot about how the areas and game are managed. This is clearly no short term process, most of the properties have been actively managed for quality and numbers for over 30 years and even the newest properties have been in process over ten years.

Hunting is worth over $750 million per year and employs over 100,000 people in South Africa. It produces a large amount of foreign currency and tourism. Total Tourism represents 3% of GDP but total foreign tourists are only 40% of the total and about 14% if you restrict the count to tourists from outside the African Continent. About 200,000 tourists, not from the African Continent, arrive in South Africa monthly and this number has been dropping. If the government goes ahead with its nationalization of land without compensation or the crime rate continues to get worse (Police are being regularly convicted for committing serious crimes using Police Vehicles and their uniforms) and scares off more foreign tourists, the effect on the South African economy would be dramatic.

The accommodation and great room at Brulbock were truly unique, the buildings having been constructed from local rock, high on a hill overlooking miles of uninhabited hills and valleys.


Last edited by Dean2; 10-01-2018 at 08:18 PM.
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