From July 17 through August 6 of 2010, I was in Zambia with my girlfriend, Jenny, and my parents on my first safari. It was a wonderful trip, thanks mostly to the efforts of Richard, Guida, and Barry Bell-Cross of Prohunt Zambia, as well as some significant help from Andrew Baldry, AR’s own fairgame, who is Rich’s close friend and has been a PH for Prohunt Zambia since its formation.

When we landed in Lusaka, Richard Bell-Cross, PH and co-owner of Prohunt Zambia, picked us up at baggage claim and helped with the paperwork on the guns and ammo – turning it into a quick, painless process. We then went to Prohunt Zambia’s offices, dropped off the guns and our larger luggage, and had tea and toast and chatted with Rich and his mother, Guida, for an hour or so before returning to the airport for a quick flight to Livingstone to spend two days at Victoria Falls.

We stayed at the Waterberry, an ecotourism lodge on the Zambezi, upstream from the falls. We did the usual side trips, including a sunset cruise, a semi-traditional African dinner in the bush, a walk through the mist of the falls, and a 30 minute helicopter ride over the falls and down Batoka Gorge, below the falls. On the last night, Jenny and I fished for tigerfish from the lodge’s dock, and I was rewarded with three fish before the mosquitoes got too bad. This is a hunting report, so I don’t want to focus on the non-hunting stuff too much, but I will say that Victoria Falls is a must-see destination on a trip to Zambia and a great place to let the jet lag wear off. Waterberry Lodge does a nice job of taking care of its guests. The sunset cruise and helicopter ride are very much worth doing, although anyone with motion sickness problems might get a little woozy if they take the 30 minute ride instead of the 15 minute ride.

Bee eaters on the Zambezi:



Sunset on the Zambezi:



Victoria Falls:







First tigerfish:



When we returned to Lusaka, Richard and his father, Barry, picked us up at the airport and took us in two pickups on the 4 ½ hour drive to Prohunt Zambia’s south camp in the Kasempa Lunga Luswishi GMA, on the Kafue River.

Each day started with a 5:30 wakeup from one of the camp staff, after which we bundled up for the morning cold, had a hot breakfast, and loaded up in the Landcruiser to start the day’s hunting. The GMA is very big – about 2,500,000 acres – so there’s a lot of driving involved. Also, the first part of the safari consisted largely of placing and checking leopard baits, which necessitated covering a great deal of country – not a bad thing, given that my father was hoping to take a few plains game animals. And, of course, many of the animals which I was interested in hunting were ones that would be best spotted while driving, and then stalked on foot.

Others on this forum have mentioned the extreme abundance of game in the Lunga Luswishi. They weren’t exaggerating. We saw hundreds of animals each day, with impala, puku, and warthogs being the most numerous. There were also many interesting nongame animals and lots of beautiful birds. Before the trip, Andrew Baldry had described the area to me as “the Garden of Eden,” and I think that’s about as well as it can be put.

Elephants:





Lions:





Puku:





Kudu:



Waterbuck:



Lodging and Food

The tents are very comfortable, with en suite baths, electric lights, and real beds. The camp is in a beautiful location, with an open-sided dining building for dinner and breakfast, and a deck for eating lunch by the rapids of the river.

Area where we sat for tea each morning and for drinks each evening after dinner (dining area is above):



Lunch on the deck:



View from the deck:



Breakfast was fairly standard fare, made with good ingredients properly prepared, but each lunch and dinner was different and special, thanks to the excellent cooking of camp chef Alex and the extensive planning of Guida, who creates a day-by-day menu for each safari, with Alex allowed significant flexibility to take into account client requests and the different meats brought in by the hunters. We ate some of everything that we killed – even the leopard, on my request – and all of it was delicious.

General Plains Game Hunting

There are many animals that may be hunted in the Lunga Luswishi – something north of twenty species, with only a few of the listed animals being real long shots (eland) or near impossibilities (yellow-backed duiker and grysbok). For everything else, odds are very high, especially if you’re willing to put in the work and can shoot straight. There are no fences, and everything is native and original, with no stocking going on. Of the general plains game, I took a beautiful Chobe bushbuck, an old zebra stallion (beautiful, pure black and white, with no shadow stripes), an excellent kudu (58”), a common duiker, an oribi, a nice warthog, and two impala. My dad shot a nice Crawshay’s defassa waterbuck (much prettier cape than a common waterbuck, but shorter horns), a heavy-horned puku, and a bushbuck. I had many opportunities to shoot big puku and a number of easy shots for trophy waterbuck and Lichtenstein’s hartebeest, but the voice of reason stepped in and told me to stop racking up the trophy fees and adding to my growing problem of too much taxidermy and not enough walls.

Chobe bushbuck:



Common duiker:



Kudu:



Puku:



Oribi:



Warthog:



Crawshay's defassa waterbuck:



Zebra:





We enjoyed an unusual extra hunting opportunity on a 250-acre island in the Kafue River, right in front of camp. The island has a number of big puku and some good bushbuck, as well as a small population of blue duikers. Rich and I took a lot of post-lunch and pre-dinner walks through the thickets at the top of the island and saw or heard blue duikers on every trip. On one of our later walks, I was able to take one shot for fur through thick brush, but unfortunately missed. I’ll definitely be back to hunt those little guys again! We hunted bushbuck on the island and caught a glimpse of a nice one, but I ultimately took mine on the mainland. One day, we walked up on a sleeping hippo cow on the island and watched her wake up and charge through the brush into the water, no more than 30 yards away the whole time. Exciting stuff! Rich, Andrew, and I joked that the island might be the basis of a good thread for the folks on AR to get riled up about: “Is island hunting ethical? How small is too small?”

Leopard

The Lunga Luswishi is known for having big leopards. One of Prohunt Zambia’s clients took the Zambian record, a 200 pound leopard if there ever was one, back in 2004. Before my trip, Andrew sent me some photos of one big cat that had hit a lion bait close to the south camp. He also told me of the Chamakubi leopard, another big cat that had eluded him the year before. Needless to say, I was pumped.

Over the first week of the hunt, we hung baits in many places, including where Andrew had photographed the leopard near camp. We had a few hits from females and found some monster tracks on the roads, but we couldn’t seem to get a big tom on bait. A trio of young male lions even climbed a tree and stole one of our baits. We finally placed
a bait near a small stream, in the area known as Chamakubi (“the place of vultures”). That bait was hit the first night by a big tom, with tracks showing it sorting out the drag we had made (nice to see that such tactics work) and the bait yanked as far down the tree as the cat could pull it. We built a blind, and Rich, Jenny, and I sat together three different times, replacing what had been eaten each day and twice hearing a bushbuck bark to announce the cat beginning its approach at dark, which is no good in Zambia, where lights are illegal. We moved the bait to the base of a tree that was a little closer to the blind and slightly more exposed, hoping that the chance of losing the bait might make the cat come sooner. For that or some other reason, on our fourth sitting, the cat showed up in the very last minute of shooting light, and I managed to take him with a single shot through the lungs with my .375 Ruger. I could barely make out his outline through my scope (I don’t think I’ll ever use a 24mm objective scope for cats again), but I was able to get the job done. After a short wait and a tense follow-up through the brush with flashlights, we found him, stone dead. Needless to say, we were thrilled. His belly was fairly empty, but he was long, measuring 7’8” from nose to tip of tail. Based on the size of the cat and its location, it seemed we had taken the Chamakubi leopard Andrew had spoken of. I couldn’t believe our good fortune. Riding back to camp seated on top of the Landcruiser with Jenny, looking at a red moon and listening to trackers Jingo and Tom and game scout Abram sing “Chipolopolo,” will forever be one of my favorite memories. My parents had left for Lusaka earlier that day, to start their trip home, so we called them from camp on the sat phone and shared the good news.

The Chamakubi leopard:





Sitatunga

With the leopard in the salt, it was time to focus on sitatunga. Prohunt Zambia offers the chance to hunt Zambezi sitatunga without requiring a trip to the Bangweulu, an area that is apparently not nearly as dependable as it used to be for sitatunga. As others have posted here before, a 35” sitatunga, the world record, came out of Rich’s camp in 2008. If you go to the Lunga Luswishi and put the time in, you will almost certainly get your sitatunga.

Andrew and Rich had cleared roads to two new swamps prior to my arrival, with one being such an overgrown jungle that hunting it would have been impractical. Here’s a link to Andrew’s write-up about exploring the new swamps:

http://forums.accuratereloadin...971032631#6971032631

The other swamp, much closer to the south camp, was chosen as the place for us to start our efforts. We fly camped twice and spent two mornings high up in a machan, but we were rewarded only with barks from sitatunga deep in the reeds. We saw, but passed on, a bull sitatunga (beautiful, but with uneven, cockeyed horns) in another swamp near the same fly camp, and then sat another swamp and saw a decent bull at last light, very far away.

Traveling to the fly camp, crossing a mostly dry swamp:



Setting up the fly camp:



While Rich, Jenny, and I were fly-camping at the new swamp, Andrew checked out another swamp, within an hour’s drive of the main camp. There, from long distance, he spotted what looked to be a 25 incher in some reeds along the Kafue River. He, Rich, and I later discussed this animal as a good one to take a look at and at least keep in mind as a fallback animal. The next afternoon, Rich, Jenny, and I went to check it out. We spent perhaps an hour creeping along the brush line that overlooked the river, stopping frequently to glass the swamp and to watch a herd of elephants on the other side and a huge group of hippos in the water. Finally, Rich spotted the bull that Andrew had told us about. We stalked closer, and when I saw how pretty the bull was and realized how perfect the moment was – overlooking the beautiful Kafue River with Jenny as the sun began to set – I didn’t care that there might be a bigger trophy out there. We made the stalk, crawling the last ten yards or so on hands and knees, and I shot the bull in his bed with my .280 Ackley. After two follow-up shots (I guess this one didn’t know that sitatunga are supposed to be “soft”), another great trophy was down. As it turned out, there was some ground growth, and the bull’s horns measured 27 inches.

Crossing a stream to get to where Andrew spotted the sitatunga:



Kafue River (note hippos in water):



My childhood sitatunga dream fulfilled:



Sunset on the Kafue River:



Sable

Sable hunting consisted of a lot of driving, looking for herds or lone bulls in dambos and through moderately thick forests of low trees. As with nearly every other animal that we saw, I was struck by how much more beautiful the sable were in real life. Pictures (and, in many cases, taxidermy) simply do not do justice to the beauty of African animals. The first good bull we stalked spooked when a honeyguide started calling at us. I had always been fascinated by the story of the honeyguide, a bird that guides men to hives in order to gain access to honey after the men break the hives open. Before the trip, I had told many people I wanted to see one and perhaps follow it to a hive. It was certainly amusing to have the first one I ever saw blow a stalk for me. Unfortunately, we had more important things to do than chase a bird to a hive, but I’ll be sure to check that experience off on my life list some day.

Herd of sable:



Bull sable:



The sable I finally shot was in a herd that I spotted (it’s fun to beat the trackers once in a while, even if only by blind luck) and was taken after an exciting stalk, including a fair amount of crawling. We slightly overestimated his horns to be 40”, but at 38”, he was still a beautiful trophy and had the black Kafue facial markings similar to those of an Angolan giant sable. Had I chosen to pass on this animal and spend more time on sable, instead of relaxing for the last few days of the safari, we might have taken a bigger animal, given that the camp runs about a 42 or 43 inch average. But that wasn’t really important to me, and I’m plenty happy with the animal I took – especially since the stalk was so much fun. With one frontal shot at 75 yards, the bull spun, ran headlong into a tree, and fell, and the serious hunting was over.

Success!



Fishing/Relaxing/Return to Lusaka

During the last few days of the safari, we drank a few extra beers and brandy and Cokes each night and slept late. We spent a fair amount of time riding up and down the river in an aluminum boat and fishing for bream, pike, and barbel (catfish). The fishing was lots of fun, and we even got to take pictures of fish eagles swooping down to take pike we had thrown for them. It was a great way to unwind before our return to the States. I also shot a few guinea fowl and a francolin and took another couple hundred photos. Barry drove us back to Lusaka, where we had lunch and did some shopping and finished our trip with a steak dinner at the Marlin, a famous restaurant in a colonial era club.

Kafue River:



Bateleur:



Hippo cow:



Cormorant:



African fish eagle:



Chef Alex prepares a very important dinner:



Dinner on Eclipse Hill:



Sunset on Eclipse Hill:



Andrew Baldry, AR’s fairgame

As mentioned above, Andrew Baldry was very generous in his efforts to help my sitatunga hunting. I can’t thank him enough for that. Also, he’s a great storyteller, with a kind spirit and a real passion for African hunting. I plan to hunt with him in the Luangwa one day, and I can say with real confidence that others would be well-served to do the same.

British Airways

We had an excellent experience with British Airways. We flew coach, but the seats were comfortable and the food pretty good. The staff in Dallas, Lusaka, and Heathrow were all very friendly and helpful in the handling of my guns and ammunition. Not a single negative word was said about guns or hunting. I would happily fly BA again.

Closing

Prohunt Zambia is a very well-run company, with a top notch area and excellent staff. Richard Bell-Cross works very hard to put his customers on great animals and to take care of the small details, to make sure the entire safari is a high quality experience. His parents, Guida and Barry, both help with the business and are each fun and interesting in their own right. Barry, who co-owns the business with Rich, acts as a manager and handles much of the interactions with the national and local government, while Guida runs the front office and attends to key administrative items like client communications and fund transfers. Everything is handled professionally, with a smile. I feel very fortunate to have chosen Prohunt Zambia for my first African safari.

great safari and trophies. Beautiful girl also...

Great report. I really love the shape of the sitatunga's horns. Congratulations on all the animals and a great trip.

George

Wonderful report, great photos and an incredible trip. Congrats on the fantastic trophies. What a trip!

Damn fine kudu, and unless your only 4.5 feet tall that's a damn fine leopard too. Congrats on a great adventure.

Wow - what a first African safari!!! thanks for sharing!!

Holy Moly,what a fantastic hunt. Your sitatunga is on my hit list. Thank you for posting.

Congratulation on an excellent first safari. You got some rare trophies for your first hunt. Also, that is a great leopard, welldone.

Great report, you got some beautiful animals there.

YOUR FIRST AFRICAN SAFARI????
Damn!
Wow what a trip. Better start building a bigger house.


You will have a hard time having a better one in the future.

CONGRADS!!! TOAD OF A LEOPARD

Hell with the hunting...Jenny's a little doll!!!

Very nice!
Thanks for the report.Your trophies are great!

Thanks for all the kind words, guys. It really was the trip of a lifetime.

One thing I left out of the report was that I proposed (successfully) to Jenny on a big hill overlooking the Kafue River on one of the last evenings of the safari. At the end of a hilltop dinner of roast sitatunga filet, Rich excused himself, and I proposed. A few minutes later, Jenny and I heard singing in the distance, which turned out to be all of the staff on Rich's landcruiser, driving up the hill to meet us. They jumped out and started dancing with us, and Rich broke out a bottle of champagne. Jenny was completely surprised by everything, and it couldn't have been a better experience for both of us. I wrote an article about it which ran in the DSC magazine convention issue.

Some really great animals you collected but that Jenny is surely the best catch of all. Congrats to you both on a great hunt and a wonderful future together.

Excellent write-up and pics, nice trophies! Well done!

Excellent hunt report and some fine, fine trophies. Congrats on your engagement!
Cheers to you both,
David

quote:

Originally posted by sandyhunter:
Thanks for all the kind words, guys. It really was the trip of a lifetime.

One thing I left out of the report was that I proposed (successfully) to Jenny on a big hill overlooking the Kafue River on one of the last evenings of the safari. At the end of a hilltop dinner of roast sitatunga filet, Rich excused himself, and I proposed. A few minutes later, Jenny and I heard singing in the distance, which turned out to be all of the staff on Rich's landcruiser, driving up the hill to meet us. They jumped out and started dancing with us, and Rich broke out a bottle of champagne. Jenny was completely surprised by everything, and it couldn't have been a better experience for both of us. I wrote an article about it which ran in the DSC magazine convention issue.

Rich is a class-act for sure!!!

Wow - fantastic hunt and beautiful trophies. It is great to be able to share the experience and to cap it off with the engagement seems perfect. Congratulations.

Well done all around. Sable, spots, and sitatunga is a pretty impressive first safari. Keep it up!

Ditto!

Sandyhunter - Congrats man, what a hunt! The Chamakubi is named correctly. You must ask Richard sometime about the "Chamakubi King".

Excellent report and photos! Sounds like you had a fantastic trip.

Jeff

Sandyhunter,

Great report and you and Jenny well deserve the Chamakubi cat.

Look forward to seeing some more photos and meeting up again.

Cheers

Andrew

A wonderful hunt and wonderful trophies!!! Congratulations!

Brett

quote:

Originally posted by Mario:
great safari and trophies. Beautiful girl also...

+1

Wow...what a hunt
Whether first or last safari, what a incredible time indeed!

Congrats to you all

quote:

Originally posted by Vince Hazen:
Wow - fantastic hunt and beautiful trophies. It is great to be able to share the experience and to cap it off with the engagement seems perfect. Congratulations.

Agreed. It sounds like a great hunt in every way, including fine specimens of good species. I've hunted Kafue, but in pretty dry, lean conditions in October, and it sounds like the game has bounced back from the sparce numbers when I was there. And congratulations on everything.

WHat a great area that is. Fantastic Leopard.

Sandyhunter,

I'm sure you think that you know just what a wonderful safari you had but I assure you in a few years you'll appreciate it even more. You did very well on some of Africa's most sought after trophies and scored a lady with what I assume is a great attitude about hunting. Her smiles say a great deal.

Zambia is one of my personal favorite places in Africa and I envy you your hunt in the Kafue as it one of the major hunting areas in Zambia that I have not been.

Oh! The leoaprd is a toad and taken the "Proper" way in daylight.

Congrats on fantastic adventure which after all is the most important part of safari.

Mark

Good stuff! congrats on some beautiful animals.

Sandyhunter's sitatunga

Congratulations on a grand safari....definitely hit this one "out of the park". Well written and great photography! Please add more pics!

Thanks again, guys. Although it was only my first trip to Africa, I'm fairly certain the Lunga Luswishi GMA is a very special place. About the only thing it lacks is a big buffalo population, but Rich and Andrew both managed to get bulls for hunters last season.

I'm swamped with work but will try to put some more photos up late tonight.

Wow what a trip!! Thx for sharing.

Photos added.

Great pictures!

Really enjoyed the report. Great pictures. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

great hunt,thanks for the pics enjoyed.

Between you and Frostbit, I'm counting the days 'til my flight leaves for Zambia! Great safari, wonderful trophies and man, was that leopard a brute...
Congratulations!

DAMN... that's all I can say is... DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!