07 January 2013, 09:28
Rob HTerry Anders Forever African Safaris - Sentinel (Zim) in October of 2012
Date: 10/2-10-/11 2012Booking Agent: Mark Young
Location: Sentinel In Zimbabwe - Limpopo Region
Safari Outfitter: Forever African Safaris (Savuli Safaris); Terry Anders
PH’s: Terry Anders, Kobus, John Hunt, Duncan Frost
Hunt Type: Buffalo, Plains Game
This is the website that covers the property we were on - however we booked with Terry Anders.
http://sentinellimpoposafaris.com/
Do to a combination of an excessive post-trip work schedule, winter local hunting seasons, and the obsessive/compulsive drive to describe every detail of the hunt in a hunting report, I am long overdue in publishing a report from my October 2012 hunt with Terry Anders and Forever African Safaris.
I decided to suppress my need to do a detailed report and just provide a quick summary so that I can get this out the door (to give you an idea, I started drafting just the hunting portion of my personal journal last weekend and I am on page 32… and I have not even put in the illustrations yet! My 2007 Namibian Journal came out to 285 pages!).
Back in late 2010 I decided to put together a hunting party made up of 6 people (four hunters and two observers) to do a 10 day hunt in Africa. My dad (Jerry) and I each wanted to hunt Buffalo, and two of my other buddies wanted to hunt Plains Game – one brought his Dad, the other his wife (these two folks were both observers).
After consulting the wisdom of AR, and attending the 2010 SCI show in Reno I booked us a trip in 2012 to hunt Savuli with Terry Anders. I booked this trip with Mark Young / Adam Clements Safari Trackers.
This was to be my second safari, and the first one that I planned soup to nuts. Well, I am sure that most folks know we all know the drama that went down in the Save in 2012, but here is a super quick recap. All but one of the operators on the Save were told that they could no longer run hunts on their leases, and military thugs were given the hunting rights. Savuli was the first of these to be seized. You can imagine my dismay upon hearing this! First what a horrible situation for Terry and his family. Second, what was to become of our hunt?? Well, as I found out many times over on this hunt, doing your homework and making contingency plans pays off. Booking with Mark was the first bit of insurance that I cashed in on. Mark was great. Not only did he help us with the 10,000 questions we had about our trip, but in the face of the Save disaster, he was frank, to the point, a good communicator, honest and worked his butt off to help ensure that all his clients were able to have good quality hunts in spite of the circumstances. So hats off to Mark and all the help he gave us. I would recommend him to anyone!
The second insurance plan we cashed in on was booking with Terry. Not to minimize what Mark did for us, but Terry had a real job on his hands. He had to figure out how, on the fly, to re-route all of his trips to new, quality hunting locations. As far as I know everyone who booked with him was happy and had a good hunt. We were no exception.
Terry relocated us to the Sentinel concession in the Limpopo region. This was a huge concession on the border with South Africa. Even though the region was in a massive drought, this area still provided us with quality animals. The only exception being that Dad was looking to get an Nyala on this hunt and while there are normally Nyala on this land, the drought hit them hard and there were no trophy Nyala to be found. (I should note that Mark and Terry saw to it that the extra daily rate that dad had paid to hunt Nyala was refunded).
The third insurance plan that I cashed in on was having a great set of contacts in place incase we had travel emergencies. On our flight to Jo-Berg, a Delta baggage handler rammed a pallet of luggage into the roof of the forward baggage compartment. The damage was severe enough that after 4 hours of delays, our flight was canceled and we ended up leaving Atlanta 24 hours later than planned. I had all the contact #’s and such to help us figure out how to change all of our flights, contact rifle expediters and work out how to extend our trip by one day so that we did not loose a day of hunting. I will say that I leveraged a travel agent for this service and this was a huge disappointment. Under no circumstances will I name the travel agent as I do not want to have this be “one of those kind of threads”. Any requests to do so will be ignored. But I was left on my own to fix about 85% of the complications that resulted from this event. I am officially done with travel agents and will be booking all my own travel in the future. I think I can do it cheaper, and if I am left on my own when things go badly, I might as well do it myself!
The fourth insurance plan I cashed in on was my packing methodology. I made sure I had everything I needed to hunt other than rifles, ammo and knives was on my person or in my carryon bags. This made for heavy carryon bags, but due to the flight screw-up, my rifles and checked bag were delayed. My rifles arrived in camp in time for my third day of hunting (terry provided camp rifles for us on the first 2 days), but my checked bag never arrived at camp – it was finally located on the second to last day of our hunt in Bulawayo and I picked it up from Terry’s HQ on the way to the airport. I was able to hunt in relative comfort as I had a set of hunting clothes, my boots, and other sundries with me. In fact, if you want a recommendation on a shirt, buy this one:
http://www.cabelas.com/product...BSearch-All+Products
I wore this thing for 10 straight days of hunting. I washed it daily and it dried in about an hour. It was super thin and cool in our 110 degree days. The pants I had started to shed on day one due to the acacia and hook thorns, this shirt had not a single rip over the whole trip… I even wrote a review for it on the cabelas site I was so impressed.
Anyway, the fifth insurance plan I had was my rifle setup. I brought a 450 Dakota for my buffalo gun, and a 375 HH for my Plains Game gun. The theory being that if I lost my ammo, I would be able to use the 375 HH for Buffalo as every camp in Africa has spare375 HH ammo floating around. Well, with the loss of my main bag, I had no ammo. My 450 Dakota may have been a paperweight, but I was able to use camp ammo and hunt with my 375. Another contingency plan I made for the rifle situation was interchangeable scopes. Both of my Rifles were CZ 550’s. I had a VX6 1-6x24 on the buffalo gun (450 Dakota) and a VX3 4.5-14x50 on the 375 HH. Clearly the 1-6x24 was the scope of choice for Buffalo. I picked up Quick Release rings for both scopes so that I could easily switch to open sights in the event of an optic failure. A side benefit was that it took all of 2 minutes and 3 shots to move and re-zero the 1-6x24 from the 450 dakota to the 375 HH. I was now set up to hunt Buffalo with my 375 HH plains game setup!
OK, enough about overcoming adversity! The rest of the trip fortunately was a pleasure!
We hunted for 10 great days. Some quick highlights:
1. Due to a drought, Bushbuck and waterbuck were not plentiful. I got a bushbuck I was pleased with, and Dad picked up a nice Waterbuck so this was a bonus.
2. There were lots of Hyena. We had a graet moonlight Hyena hunt and a few days later Dad connected with a nice big Hyena and by buddy Ray also connected with one.
3. My Buddy Kirk was able to get a nice warthog and Impala with his Bow. He hunted with Duncan Frost and Duncan showed him a good time.
4. There was a Leopard tag available that I was given a chance at filling too. We only spent 6 days really trying for a leopard, but had one on camera from a natural kill, and got one on one of our baits, but he did not come in while we were in the blind. The upside is I got to shoot a bunch of impala and experience the joy and trials of leopard hunting.
5. Most importantly from my perspective, dad and I got our Buffalo! To top it off we got them AT THE SAME TIME on day 3. So we got to watch each other take our Buffalo and get all the photos taken together. My dad just turned 77 last month so having a chance to do this hunt with him was a great treat. Being able to be with each other while we got our Buffalo was a total unexpected bonus and one I am very grateful for!
We had a great hunt. The four hunters shot a total of 59 animals on our 10 day hunt. This included bait impala, impala for camp meat, and of course our trophies.
Here is the count of animals by hunter and an average yardage for the shots, followed by photos of some of the animals that Dad and I shot (not posting photos of my buddies with their animals – I’ll let them do that if they choose to)
And the Buffalo:
