27 March 2013, 22:26
EXPRESSSo I sent the letter to Profihunt, andto my surprise, got no reply.
Here it is;
Well Artem,
I was going to wait until I got my skin here before I told you exactly what I thought about the hunt because I was worried that is might cause me more problems.
Coincidently, I just received news that my skins are not in good condition, so I am sure my troubles from Russia are not finished yet.
Understandably you are quite upset to learn that I am not happy with the reality I found in camp, compared to what I thought would happen.
However, there are no two different ways to look at this, I bought a bear hunt in the belief that I would be hunting, stalking on foot, snowshoes or skis, as it is described in the brochure. Chasing bears and shooting them from the sled is not only unsporting, not my idea of a hunt, no fun, but it is also against the law. For some clients this could have very serious consequences because of the Lacey act I am sure you are familiar with. It became very obvious there was nothing I would be able to do about it for two reasons; One because my guide did not have the equipment to conduct this kind of hunt, and two because it because very apparent they were not prepared to do things “my way”.
When I discovered that this was how the hunt was going to be conducted I asked the interpreter to explain to my guide that I preferred to hunt on foot.
However the very next day, he chased a bear, the sled flipped over, and my rifle got broken in two. With no rifle, and having seen that there was no way I was going to get to hunt the way I was supposed to I just decided to kill a bear and get the hunt over with.
You did not communicate anything about me and my booking to Turuchev, in fact, when I got to camp they thought they were getting an Italian client who spoke no English, and the guides, obviously had no idea of who I was or that I thought I would be hunting, not chasing bears.
Quoted from your emails: “Yes,please bring the the snow shoes,you will normally need them. 26/04/2010 08:54” – My guide did not have any snow shoes or skis, so hunting on foot was out of the question.
“Please just be sure to make a special note to let the guides in camp know that I am prepared to work very hard, harder than most clients will to get a good, big bear. I am not the kind of hunter who gives up, ever! “ Wed, 7 Apr 2010 – I asked you this question because I know that most clients are older and not in great physical shape, so the guides are used to making it easy for them and letting them shoot the first decent animal they see.
“I will pass the information to my local partner that you are ready to work hard to get a big trophy. 19/04/2010 09:30” - This very obviously did not happen.
Here is an outline of my trip into camp which I have not yet posted on the forum, also because I had decided that enough was enough and I didn’t need to give out any more negative information. But since you ask, here it is for you.
In Moscow Rifat and the girl arrived to pick me up, Rifat was late, but no problems there. The next day I caught the flight to Petropavlovsk. No big problems there either. In Petropavlovsk there was no one to meet me, and after some time Artem Turuchev came, but I did not know he was looking after me, or that he had anything to do with Profihunt or Kamchatka Trophy Hunts but he told me to get on the bus with the group of hunters booked with the Hunting Consortium. At the supermarket I was taken off the bus, taken to a hotel and told to wait. After about 12 hours I was told that a car was coming to get me. A lady arrived in a taxi at midnight. She was tired, and did not know the road. By 02:00 she was falling asleep, and I kept offering to drive. Eventually she fell asleep and I drove for a few hours. When she woke up she said we had missed the turn off and turned around and drove back towards Petropavlovsk. We found another car and asked for directions. They told us to turn around again. We had not missed the turn off. Finally at Esso, there was no one to meet me, but there was another Profihunt client from France who told me he had been stuck in Esso for three days and no one had been to pick him up or contacted him. Apparently when they came to pick up his group he was not in the hotel and they left without him. The hotel receptionist at the hotel told me I would be taken to the helipad shortly and so it was.
So in your experience it is normal and acceptable to receive a client in a foreign airport with no interpreter, then put them into a hotel and tell them to wait and not to leave the hotel for a whole day, with no clear communication of what is going to happen, until late at night, then put them in a taxi to undertake a long overnight journey with a driver who is not prepared for the trip and does not know the road, forcing the client to drive themselves on an unknown road while the driver sleeps?? I was awake for a period of 50 hours from Moscow to camp because I never got a chance to relax because I never knew what was coming next.
It is obvious that how I was to get to Esso had not been organized, but Turuchev did the best he could at the last minute. It was enough to get me to camp which was enough for me, but since you are asking what went wrong, here it is.
The camp was very good, and the food was good and abundant. But as I said, once I asked the interpreter to explain to my guide that I wanted to use the snowmobile for transport but stalk on foot he told me “ok, this is how it’s gonna happen; your guide will drive up close to the bear, real close and you will shoot the bear. It will all happen very quickly and there won’t be much time so be ready.”
You can blame your partners in Kamchatka, you blame whoever you want, I don’t care, I bought this hunt from you at Profihunt and I believed I would be hunting, not chasing bears on snowmobiles. This hunt cost me a lot of money and time, and it was not what I bought in to. I booked hunt with Profihunt, not to travel for three days to chase a bear and kill it like a dog from a snowmobile. There is nothing that is going to change this truth.
I can continue however in my report of the hunt and point out a few more things that were not acceptable for a paying customer. Once I got back to camp with the bear I learned that the other clients in camp wanted to leave early so I was given the possibility to go on their flight to Esso, or stay in camp. I said I would leave camp only on the condition that I would be able to change my tickets so I could fly back to Milan. So on this condition I left camp.
At this point I gave the tips as you had suggested in your email, (which I also found unprofessional to tell me about the tips after I have paid for the hunt and made the booking) and it happens that they were not happy with the amounts I gave them. The guide expected double what you told me and the interpreter said he usually gets $200 but you did not mention him at all.
After the helicopter flight we were driven back to Petropavlovsk in a van. The road was dusty and the visibility was zero because of other trucks in front of us. We asked many, many times for the driver to slow down and he would not. We almost crashed when a truck came the other way and we were going to hit it because it was not possible to see it until it was just a few meters away. I am not the sort of person to be afraid easily, I have raced cars and motorcycles and have no fear of speed, I am a licensed skydiver. But that idiot was driving at 120km on the dirt, in a manner to risk the lives of everyone on board and refused to take notice of our requests to slow down. One of the other passengers was praying during the drive.
Back in Petropavlovsk I discovered that I could not change my flights and I ended up spending 5 days waiting for my flight. During this time Turchev and the interpreter did try to help me and it was not their fault the tickets could not be changed. However you should not give confirmation of something that you have not checked and cannot know for sure until you have. You saved the cost of an entire helicopter flight for just one hunter, me out of camp on my hunt as well, because it was paid for by the two other hunters in my camp and two others in the next camp who also wanted to leave early and paid for it themselves.
The very least you could have done was to make sure I was properly looked after in Petropavlovsk while I was stuck there.
You can be sure that Turuchev told me exactly, or at least through the interpreter “ I bet you spoke to Vaselov, he never tells me anything about the clients and I have had this happen before” when I was telling him that I was not pleased about chasing the bears with the snowmobile. He told me it is possible to do a hunt the way I wanted to but he needed to be warned ahead of time. How else do you explain that The Hunting Consortium clients who were also hunting with Turuchev’s camps and guides got to hunt on properly foot because they were filming for the American TV shows? Because Bob Kern spoke with Turuchev and told him that these clients wanted to hunt on foot. Something you did not do. He also told me that Bob Kern tells him exactly what each client wants on his hunt. I should have found out before that Kamchatka bear hunts are conducted this way, but most of the clients who do it pretend they did something very difficult and tell different stories about it.
Basically you all seem to have problems getting organized amongst yourselves, and I travel to hunt, not collect specimens. I have been very happy on many hunts where I did not kill anything but hunted well. This is obviously very different to most of your other clients.
I discovered that the cost of this hunt is $6,500USD, plus the helicopter flights. Helicopter cost $7000 US per hour. In my case you only had to pay for the helicopter flight in to camp, because the flight out was paid for by the hunters who wanted to leave camp early. There were 7 hunters on my 45 minute flight in, which means we paid approximately $1000(or less) each. So this means that I paid your agency around $2,500 for services, but I fail to see where they were provided except for the voucher and invitations which you did very efficiently, but it is also a very simple operation.
The day before I was due to catch my flight I received a message to get a taxi to the airport at 10:30. I knew that check in was at 09:30 and the flight was overbooked, so I was not going to risk losing my seat. I went to the airport at 09:00. When I presented my papers, bag and rifle for inspection at the airport entrance, a whole lot of commotion started. I called the interpreter and he came. It turns out that they were going to arrest me because in Russia a foreigner with a firearm must be accompanied at every moment. This would have been a nice piece of information to have received earlier.
So Artem, you can see I had quite a few problems, none of which I would be complaining about if you had just sold me the hunt that is publicized, instead of one where you chase bears on snowmobiles. I know what commercial hunting is about. I also run a hunting operation in Italy where I receive clients from all over the world, and you can be sure that if any of these things were to have happened to a client of mine, there would be big trouble. I am not a difficult client to please, I do not need fancy accommodations, food or even a good guide because I can hunt for myself.
I have hunted in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakstan, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, England, Italy, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Australia, Canada, USA and travelled to too many other countries to remember for spearfishing, so I know what it is about and I know when I have been sold a lie.
Each time I asked you a question you did not like, you never gave a straight answer, for example when I asked what would happen if I could not fly because of the volcano, you dodged the question. When I asked what would happen if I was not able to get the visa, you dodged the question. When I told you I was stuck in Petropavlovsk, you dodged the problem and gave me an answer that did not address my situation, or give me any information I did not already have. I wrote you a email plainly stating I was “not in a good situation” and you want to congratulate me for killing a bear, which you know is not hard to do, from the back of a snowmobile. Again, I call that dodging the question, which is something you have done in most of the emails where I posed questions you did not want to answer.
I also spoke to previous clients of Profihunt who told me they shot from helicopters on past hunts.
“I would like to meet you one day so that you can repeat it to me face to face.” What is that, a threat? It is this comment on it’s own that has prompted me to take more action on this issue, which, as I have already said I would have left alone because I felt that more than enough had already been said.
As to you anger over my posting the details of this hunt, you should take note that my thread began as a description of the difficulties I had with getting my visa, and while some people were putting blame on the agent I was very clear to defend you position “I do not fault them for my problems, but I was told I would need to organize my own visa.”
“I've had time to reflect on this hunt and basically I blame myself for not being more careful with the agent. on any future hunts I want to get written confermation of the guides names who will be guiding me and their response and approval to my requests, which are, for a fair chase hunt”
My points are fair and objective, and as you can see a huge number of people agree with me. You don’t like hearing that I said you were kissing my ass for killing a bear when I was telling you I was in the shit in Petropavlovsk? Well I don’t like people dodging my questions, and I don’t like being sold a lie, I don’t like being unnecessarily stuck for 5 days and spending an extra $1000 on a hunt for no reason. I don’t like it when people do not maintain their promises; Regarding the problems with the skin, which may now be ruined because your partners in Kamchatka did not look after it properly.
I know that your hunt contract states that any disputes must be made before leaving camp, and in fact I did not intend on making a dispute out of this hunt. I knew there was no way I was going to get any satisfaction from that point, my only option was to ask to be taken home on day 2. I’m sure that it would have cost me a helicopter charter and I would never have seen any money back from Profihunt. I can bear my losses, but now that I have your attention, I’ll give you a chance to see what you want to do about it, considering that there are still plenty of things that I can put to the public that are very compromising, since you are the one making threats, something else I don’t appreciate.
Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t tell everyone who asks that your bear hunts are done by chasing them on a snowmobile.
this year it is a mid Caucasian tur donation.