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Dates: May 23 to June 10. 2010 Area: Dande Safari Area Outfitter: Charlton-McCallum Safaris PH: Myles McCallum Videographer: Justin Drainer Rifles: Model 70 Winchester .416 Rem; CZ 554 9.3x62 Ammunition: 400 grain Swift A-Square and 400 Hornady DGS; 250 Nosler Accubonds Hunt: 18 day, Tuskless Cow, Buffalo bull, Leopard Travel: SAA out of Dulles to Jo-burg (18 hours with stop in Dakar) and laid over a day in Jo-burg at the African Sky B&B and then on to SAA to Harare In a recent post, Rob Jolley spoke of laying over a day to acclimate yourself and I couldn’t agree more especially when you jump five or six time zones as we mid-western Americans must Robert Ruark spoke of “Time to let your soul catch up with your body.” I spent a day in the hurly-burly of Jo-burg doing a bit of site-seeing and a little(damned little) birding, but it helped. Also, I got some feel for the pre-World Cup craziness that was afoot in South Africa. Even three weeks before, there was a disturbance in the force that was quite apparent. Even so, I arrived at Dande with my baggage and rifles. At least two of the other hunters in the B&B left for camp without one or the other. Myles picked me up in Harare and we had a delightful (for me) drive to Dande. We had a lot of windshield time to absorb the local color and politics and several road blocks to test Myles’s skills in diplomacy. Coming into the area in the late afternoon, we ran into the afore-mentioned Mr. Jolley and Des Jenkins, gamekeeper extraordinaire, and Buzz a few miles out of camp. A word here, if Buzz Charlton is the Rock Star of CM Safaris then I had the great pleasure of hunting with Myles McCallum who is “the Rock” of the group. His patience, quiet demeanor and complete competence made this whole adventure very satisfying and completely successful. The first evening at Pedza Pasi was pleasant and filled with libations and good company. The camp itself was pleasant surprise. It was a very classy operation with all the little things that seem very correct and just so. A nice well-stocked bar where every plan was made the night before and every win was celebrated the evening after. A comfortable campfire where we met every night to be entertained by Jappie’s tame Bushbabies and talk about our day. Spacious rooms where there was always a carafe of ice water and lots of hot water for showers. And wonderful food hot from Crispin’s wood stove laid out by white-garbed servers and Crispin in his gleaming white chef’s attire. Another aspect was the cold room—this refrigerator was perfect for aging meat and keeping provisions fresh. This was powered by a quiet and very efficient generator which was another plus for Pedza. The first night, we got to see Justin’s video of the famous “buffalo bowling” event where one good shot killed one bull and sent three others tumbling down the hillside and to look at the long and beautifully matched tusks of Rob’s elephant bull. A great evening where one can make good friends in a short time. There were in fact, buffalo 50 yards below camp and a dagga boy wandering across the campus as I walked to my chalet. This was in fact, wild Africa in all its splendor. Day One: After sighting in, (my .416 was, as always, “spot on” but the CZ took a bit of readjustment) both guns were sighted in for 50 meters and we were off. Essentially we spent the first day checking leopard baits that Buzz and Rob had left hanging. At one we encountered a smallish and not threatening Puff Adder which moved away in an unhurried fashion. Myles noted that the tracks on the road in the morning are like a newspaper telling what has transpired the previous evening. Throughout the hunt we were seeing leopard tracks everywhere. A good proportion of them were large males that deserved to be fed. In an effort to start putting up our own baits (Buzz’s were getting a bit ripe) we headed out with the intent of shooting a few impala. The heavy cover made plains game hard to see—especially for me. One of the big advantages of good hunting early for leopard was that there is still a lot of cover and that makes the leopards a little hungrier and more prone to come to the baits. Myles, Justin and the trackers, soon became acquainted with a couple of my many short-comings—I was not seeing as well as one would hope. I had trouble picking out a couple of potential bait impala. Myles said, ”You can see the red stripe on just by that rusty colored bush,” Being red-green color-blind, I, in fact, could not. As I said Myles was very patient and being the consummate gentleman, he quickly made adjustments and accommodations for an aging hunter and we pressed on. Essentially After our delightful lunch, complete with table cloth and matching dinner ware –something right out of “Horn of the Hunter” and a nap, we went after buffalo, We got in on a couple of bulls but, made wary by the constant presence of lions, they spooked before we could get a good shot. Day 2: We headed out looking for a buffalo and got on them almost right in camp. We picked a herd up right below the Pedza airstrip and I was actually looking through my scope at a cow when Myles pulled me off; she had a calf as did most of the cows in that herd. Given the pressure they were under from lions Myles decided that we back off of this group. Justin found a leaf with blood on it—obviously the lions were making their presence known. After lunch, we headed for the Mururu area, the other Dande camp, and found where a good-sized herd had crossed the road and we were buffalo hunting again. We were willing either to shoot a small bull or cow for the Park rations or to get a good dagga boy for my leopard bait. We found the herd in the dense cover along the Maunde River and were trying to maneuver in on them when we almost stepped on a pair of male lions which had the same idea. The lions departed and left us to chase the buffalo who were slowly moving on ahead of us toward the river. I got on the sticks several times but we could never quite isolate on the right buff in the right position. Then Myles, in a brilliant move, decided that the bulls and older cows were usually at the head of the herd so we cut back and looped around ahead of the herd. As we came out ahead of the herd, we saw a huge-bodied black bull already drinking out in the river. Myles set up the sticks and I got off a good shot. Well-hit, the bull ran about 20 yards and fell. He was in his death throes and Myles told me to keep shooting. Justin, professional that he is, was always in the right position got some great footage. The bull ended up down in about 6 inches of water and we got seriously stuck trying to drive up the river to do the recovery. After breaking the winch cable, Jappie came to bail us out. He affected a rescue and helped us with the recovery. IMG]http://i848.photobucket.com/albums/ab43/rgunner1/dande/IMG_3802.jpg[/IMG] Day 3: We awoke to hyenas again and headed out to put up baits. I admire Justin and the trackers for their ability to remain cheerful after riding in the back of the cruiser with five or six pieces of buffalo and a garbage can full of matumbo. The days fell into a certain rythym. We had a good idea of where there were good male leopards hanging out now we had baits, so it was a matter of just finding the right tree and sending Norest, the most acrobatic of the trackers, up to throw a rope over the limb and secure the meat. Then if it was late in the day, the trackers would do a drag up and down the roads to make sure that Ingwe didn’t miss the tree full of snacks that we left for him. As we set the baits, we took advantage of some modern technology to learn who was feeding and when. We had three trail cameras that Justin strategically placed on the most likely of the 7 baits. This day we were near Mururu camp and had lunch and siesta there. Mururu was located on the Munemi river and was more remote and lacked a little of the infrastructure of Pedza but it had a bit more scenic setting. Before I drifted off, I lay on a real bed and watched beautiful yellow butterflies flitting through the vegetation along the river which ran immediately in front of camp and sometimes even closer than that. According to the camp manager, there were lions wandering between the chalets every night and elephant and dagga boy tracks all up and down the sandy river bed. Mururu was a real wilderness outpost. Birds abounded here and if you have the slightest interest in ornithology, Myles is a superior birder (“Twitcher”) and never made a single misidentification on the entire hunt. We had another sumptuous meal and afterwards sat around a small fire and were entertained by watching the Bushbabies come down to eat the popcorn that Jappie put out for them. Day 4: Again as we checked baits, we saw leopard tracks everywhere. We saw a couple of them on the trail cams. We had the luxury of multiple views that allowed us to determine that it was indeed a “she.” On another the bait near Manfred, we saw tracks of a female accompanied by two cubs and always there seemed to be large males lurking nearby. We found that one big male was hanging out near Mururu Camp. Myles knew his tracks and knew that he had been hunted before. Myles was sure that he was a morning feeder and so we built a blind, cleared a path and prepared to leave early the next morning. We returned to camp that night to find that, at last, my brother, Michael, had arrived in camp along with his PH, Rich Tabor. It was good to see him and to meet Rich. Rich’s first comment was, “I hear you are sitting on a leopard in the morning”. Well, yeah, I reckon. I am not known for being a calm person and have thought long and hard about shooting leopard. A lot has been written about the pressure that comes with making what well may be the easiest shot of the hunt. (Capstick sasy, "The eAsiest shot you will have on your safari...will be at your leopard. It is also the shot you will be most likely to blow.")It will be a shot of less than a hundred yards and with a good rest but with the distinct possibility that if you screw it up, that a follow up would be necessary and someone might get scratched up. Given that fact and my poor vision and my great desire to shoot a leopard, I did not sleep at all that night. Day 5: We began very early, up at three and on the road for the longish drive to Mururu. Not that big a deal for me, as I hadn’t slept anyhow. There was a full moon so it wasn’t totally dark as we parked a good way off, walked in a kilometer or so to the path.Then we took off our shoes and sox and tiptoed into the blind. I lay on the floor of the blind and waited interminably for the cat's arrival. Light came with the call of Swainson’s Francolin and eventually after the sun was fully up we gave up and started checking our baits and cameras as we made our way back to camp. This time the Manfred bait had been hit again. The trail cam showed that a big male had fed the evening before, arriving at 5 p.m. in good light and returning three or four times during the night and came the last time around 8 a.m. IMG]http://i848.photobucket.com/albums/ab43/rgunner1/dande/TSC_0027.jpg[/IMG] Blind building time again. This time we built a veritable hotel with an extra wing to accommodate Justin and his camera. Myles custom built the blind to allow easy access for his aging and not very graceful client. He spoke at length about how different things will look in low light and that I should find a bench mark that I could easily find and then move to the bait and the cat when he came. I sat just where I would and thought I felt confident that I could find the bait regardless of the light. We went back to camp for lunch and a nap and left about 3:15. We parked well down the main road and walked in for at least a mile to the well-marked trail and then took off our shoes and walked in for about 350 yards down a carefully cleared path. We slid silently into the blind, Myles at a lookout hole and Justin had his camera already in place where he could watch the bait with little disturbance through his view finder. I was behind Myles 6 feet or so and layed back in the soft dirt and began my vigil. Nothing—the sunlight was getting a bit dim and I thought, “Well our chance has slipped away.” I was waiting to be told that it was time to leave, when Myles grabbed my ankle and i went from an idle to full RPMs in a single second. As gracefully and quietly as I could I settled in my seat and looked through the scope. The light was failing and although it was still technically daylight I could not get exactly in the same place I had been that morning and the landmark that I had picked wasn’t visible. The next few minutes seemed an eternity. I had consciously chosen not to spend the extra thousand dollars for an expensive European scope and was suddenly sorry that I had not. At that point I would have gladly written them a check for the difference. In my great-in-the–daylight American-made scope, I could see what I thought was (and indeed was) the bait tree. The dark bait was obscured by the feeding cat as it was quatering away from me and was which was simply a gray smudge indistinct and without any obvious sort of shape or spots. Without my landmark and any clear target I was not about to shoot. Myles was insistent that I keep looking till it became clear and I felt the pressure building like a boiling tea kettle. Then suddenly in the last few minutes of discernable light, the indistinct blob materialized as the cat turned from feeding, made his way down the branch toward the blind and prepared to step off the tree. I am not sure whether he paused or not, but as he turned he gave me a shoulder and a rib cage and I shot. I could recall the crosshairs on the 9.3 being perfectly placed hard behind his shoulder but when you are shooting leopard can you ever be absolutely sure? I heard no noise but those with better hearing said they heard a soft rumble. After I got my heart beat under control, we headed back for the truck, rifles at the ready, to look at the instant replay. Justin’s camera work was again exquisite. It showed the cat coming straight down off the branch and vanishing in the dark. Bongi declared it, “Lung shot” and was instantly ready to go in. Myles implored me to stay behind and given my poor night vision as evidenced so far, I wouldn’t have wanted me with a loaded gun behind me either. So with a little lighthearted laughter, the two trackers, Myles and Justin set off leaving me with Eddie the driver. In a few long minutes the radio crackled and to my great relief, Myles told Eddie that the leopard was dead as expected and …“That he was to tell Dick that he had killed a Beeg Bool” In a few minutes I was there standing thirty yards from the bait over an exquisitely beautiful cat. After a few cursory pictures, they lifted the cat on my shoulders and I had the great honor of carrying him back to the cruiser. A kilometer or so from camp, the trackers started a jubilant chant and the camp staff was waiting for our return with great celebration and dancing. I got to shake hands with each of them and then headed off for a shower to almost reluctantly wash off the leopard blood. At dinner an hour later, we toasted the leopard into the night. I cannot remember feeling better. Day 6: After our photo op with the leopard and a bit of measuring (He was 6’9” and weighed about 140 lb. I would have guessed a lot heavier while I was carrying him out the night before Myles said that was a good size for the Zambezi Valley.) we set out for elephant and are at last getting a chance to follow up on the myriad tracks we have been seeing. We have been finding more cow and calf elephant tracks moving across the road than anything else. As we left the cruiser for the first time, Myles said, “You know, Dick, this is the most dangerous thing you will ever do…” In retrospect, I think that is a big part of why I am here. The greatest danger the usual American hunter faces is falling out of a tree blind. Anybody can whack a whitetail deer out the window of a deer stand. Day 6 through 10: With that thought in mind, we set off. The whole routine takes on a pattern. Tracks on the road, Bongi and Norest dismount and move out on a short reconnaissance trip to determine how long it has been since the animals passed. In a couple of minutes they return and give us the word. If they are fresh enough, we would take off. Norest would pass down my rifle and I would slide a solid in the chamber over the three in the magazine, put on the safety and hand my gun off to Bongi, who carries it with great ease. I felt a bit guilty not carrying my own gun. On previous safaris I have always carried my rifle but it has been seven years since the last time I hunted in Africa and I have slowed down a step or two. I will be 70 in a few short months and I rationalized that nobody else in the group is even half my age. This way, I don’t slow things down inordinately and I find one of the keys to finding tuskless cows is being able to look at a lot of animals and that requires a good deal of walking. Only two or three percent of the elephants are tuskless and obviously every group in not going to have one. The progression is much the same. The trackers move off through the tall grass and thick jesse and we follow as best we can. The trackers are looking for tracks and constantly assessing the freshness of the great mounds of dung and the moistness of the sap of the branches that the browsing jumbos have broken off. Then with luck, Bongi freezes like a bird dog on a point and cups his ears. We hear the rumbling communications of the herd and then slowly, testing the wind at every opportunity, we move in. One of the best things about elephant hunting is the visibility of our quarry. There is not fuzzy leopard or indistinct impala, or even a partially obscured black buffalo in deep shadow. These wonderful beasts are relatively easy to see. I say this only to admit that on the first group, I was straining to see a rumbling herd in the distance, only to see a flicking tail 30 yards away . The brachystegia habitat is remarkable-- offering some clear views of a herd a mile away and yet not revealing a browsing cow that you can almost touch. The first group is easy to see and every one there has “teeth.” We withdrew and all breathed a bit easier. Going straight from the tension of making one precise shot on a leopard to a very different kind of pressure is a bit unnerving and I am glad that I am not being called on to shoot this morning. It takes a few hours to adjust this new game. We walked an average of 5 to 7 hours a day. Even at a mile and a half an hour, that amounts to some serious miles given that much of it was through thick jesse. The next group we track is more or less in the open. We slide in to within 50 yards and begin looking them over. Suddenly there she is, a good- sized tuskless with five or six companions and no dependent calves in the group. We are trying to decide our exact plans when the fickle wind swirls and the lead cow starts waving her trunk like lawn sprinkler. Then comes the loudest natural noise I have ever heard with the possible exception on a clap of thunder. The cow shrieks in anger and behind me I hear Justin, in his proper Zimbabwean accent, calmly say, ”They’re coming…” Thankfully they don’t have us pinpointed and we can allow discretion to be the better part of valor and slip away. In retrospect, Myles was disappointed that we didn’t get a group charge. The tuskless stayed back and the matriarch led the mischief or we might have had a good frontal brain shot and resolved things then and there. At one point somewhere near, Mururu, we are circling back to truck and sort of following a set of dagga boy tracks through some thick jesse, when we heard a warning growl and the call of a buffalo in distress. Myles explained that some lions have a buffalo pinned down and are in the process on killing him. We made a circle of a hundred yards or so to get back to the road and radio for Eddie, our driver, to come pick us up. We hear a few more sounds and while Myles and the trackers wait for the cruiser, they nonchalantly chat certainly no more than a few rods from the growing and rumbling confrontation. Justin, the group comic, found a big rock and tosses it in the grass a few feet behind them. Thinking the lions have taken exception to their presence, the aura of nonchalance quickly disappears then dissolves into laughter. Later I ask Myles what the dagga boy’s chances of escape were and he says, “zero.” On the fourth day of elephant chasing, we go to a hilly part of the concession close to teh border wth Chewore and follow tracks again climb a steep hill. Myles noted that this country is a lot like Makuti, the other big holding that CM has leased. We were scheduled to hunt there last year but had to cancel. Personally given the size of the hills I am glad to be in Dande where the relief is on average a little less. From the hill top we spot another herd—all with tusks—and a distant quite nice bull. Then we looped back to the truck. Throughout our walks, Myles is pleased with the number of good bulls and potentially good bulls we have seen. I think that hunting elephant bulls here would be a fairly sure thing and CM is averaging over 50 pounds per tusk so far this year. After lunch we drove a short distance and crossed a small drainage and saw fresh tracks. Bongi and Norest take a quick look and concur. Myles says “These tracks are fresh, fresh…” less than an hour old. The smell of fresh elephant shit and freshly crushed eucalyptus leaves are a heady indication that we are getting close. Freshly broken branches and rumbling calls let us know that we are getting in on them. We closed on the herd within a half an hour and a quick assessment showed that there is one large tuskless and no dependent calves in this group. We moved in as close as we dare and a swirl of wind betrayed our presence and the herd or 6 or 7 shuffle away with very little noise. They go over a small rise and we approach once again. They have stopped in an open spot in the brachystegia and we used the existing cover to close in to about 40 yards. The tuskless is at what appears to be a right angle from us. Myles sets up the sticks and whispers, “Shoot it right here,” and taps my ear. I am a little shaky on the details but somehow the gun went off and the elephant toppled like a falling wall. In the next few seconds we retreat as the herd demonstrates and trumpets and rushes about. We climb up on a small pile of rocks and wait. The cows stick around for a few minutes and move off. Then I got a congratulatory handshake from everyone and we moved back in. I am fairly blasé about the whole thing and walk in behind Myles and Bongi with my rifle on my shoulder and am shocked to look up and see the cow standing. I am obviously not as great a shot as I thought. Myles summoned me to his side and I shoot again getting the frontal brain shot this time and she throws her trunk in the air and falls this time for good. As I approached is she has fallen on the side I shot at originally but there is an exit wound in her other shoulder. Did I miss by that much? At any rate I cut off the tail with more difficulty than I imagined and since it is now late in the afternoon, we headed back for camp and another night of good food and great company. The next day we do recovery and when we turned the cow over, I find that I did in fact hit her smack in the ear but apparently she had been quartering to me and the 400 grain Hornady DGS bullet had gone behind her brain and out her other shoulder, probably clipping the spine on the way through and knocked her down but not out. The last shot was perfect, right between her zygomatic arches and mercifully had done the job. The recovery was uneventful if labor intensive and the carcass fit nicely into two cruisers. Most of the meat went to the very appreciative local community who is desperately in need of protein and the scraps were kept in camp for the staff. With our three target animals in the salt, we made a new plan. Our mission became now to take the ration buffalo for Park Department staff. We take off early on a beautiful morning, 64 degrees and clear and beautiful. We find tracks (“Fresh, fresh”) not far from camp and set out. The ground is level and the walking is easy. This may be my last day to set out on to hunt dangerous game and I am a bit sad. This has been too much fun. We stopped several times for Bongi and Norest to sort out the tracks and press on finding a couple of groups of cows. I get on the sticks couple of times but can’t sort out a shoulder on a cow that doesn’t have an attending calf. Finally in a small valley we get a on a group of fine black buff shining in the morning sunlight and after taking a long hard look, Myles said, “You can take any of those if you get a shot.” I am concentrating on finding a shoulder and finally see one that separates out slightly behind and above another buff. I hold as low as I can without hitting the horns of the closest one. At the shot the whole herd takes off and are out of sight before I can get in a follow up shot. They vanish behind a small rocky hill. Myles said that it looked like a good shot, I couldn’t tell. We climbed the hill cautiously, looking for our buffalo. There at the bottom on the hill was our buffalo down and struggling but unable to get to its feet. I shoot twice more at what I can see. (“Nice shooting, Dick, you got him in the fillets.”) Now it over, to my surprise it is a young bull. I had been concentrating on getting a good shot that I hadn’t realized that the whole group was made up of bulls. Myles had given upon finding a cow without an accompanying calf. Recovery was simple and on the way back, Myles radioed the Parks Department to come get their meat. That afternoon, we took a walk down the Kumzeezee River near camp looking for a bushbuck. It was a great walk down a beautiful stream, shady and sandy with tracks of everything—leopard, buffalo, elephant, lion not to mention bushbuck, impala, hyena, civet and warthog. Myles tried to convince me to shoot a rare one-tusked Warthog, an animal found only in Dande. The next few days were laid back and devoted to long walks down the various streams looking for bush buck. We didn’t see that many but there were tracks on every river bed we followed. I missed a long poke (190 m) at one and shot a nice impala ram to add to our own camp rations. IMG]http://i848.photobucket.com/albums/ab43/rgunner1/dande/IMG_3802.jpg[/IMG] During this time, we did a lot of management stuff. We indulged our pyromaniac urges and did a lot of burning to green things up for the hunters who will be coming later. We visited the neighboring villages along the Angwa River and did some boundary marking. Myles and Justin helped me identify a few new trees—Sausage trees and strangler figs and Conbretum and Mopane. All in all, a very easy low-pressure hunt—except Myles kept trying to get me to shoot that same one tusked Warthog. On our last day, we took Eddie and Norest home to Kenyemba and then Myles took my brother and me on a boat trip up the Zambezi where we got opportunities to leave our scent markers in both Mozambique and Zambia.One of the things that I managed to do was ride to the river on the back of the cruiser. In five safaris ihad never done that for any protracted time and it was great fun and added a new point of view. We too visited the Red Cliffs and the Gates and although we didn’t get to fish as the Zambezi was near flood stage we saw lots of great wildlife including hippo and crocs and added a bunch of great birds to my list—African Fish Eagles, Racket-tailed Rollers, Pied Kingfishers, Senegal Coucals, Purple-crested Louries, Wattled Plovers and the ever popular Little Bee-eater. A lovely day on one of Africa’s greatest rivers. The dreaded trip back had a couple of highlights. I was in the Jo-burg airport when South Africa scored the World Cup’s first goal against Mexico and the roof almost came off when hundreds of vuvuzelas buzzed and blared their approval. A glorious moment and here as I sit 10 days later, I am happy to say that both the USA and England have made it to the knock-out round. The Brits expected to be there, but in our country any success in football is always a surprise. The other was a chance to meet Tim Danklef, co-producer of “Tracks Across Africa” and Steve Hornady of Hornady Manufacturing Inc. and Mike Fifer, CEO of Ruger. I told Steve that the one DGS 400 grain bullet I had recovered was capable of being reloaded and he said, “Oh please don’t do that. Buy some new ones; we need the business.” All told, this safari exceeded my expectations. In fact, it was probably the best thing I have ever done. The cover was thick which made the leopard hunting better but it made it hard to see things like buffalo and plains game—a trade off which I gladly accepted. Buffalo hunting is always great. As Robert Ruark says, “No matter how many times you return, you will always hunt buffalo” The tuskless cow hunting was as exciting as anything I have ever done. It is not easy but and required a lot of tracking and following before we finished, but we won in the end. We looked at something in excess of 120 cows and calves and saw only 5 tuskless—three of those in one herd which we found after we had already shot our cow. The leopard hunting was the most rewarding and nerve racking. That cat is certainly my favorite trophy ever. All in all, Mylo , the consummate professional hunter and Justin Drainer (who is the bravest guy I know and he can walk backwards and keep filming as fast as I can run forward and who is a helluva a field naturalist and still photographer as well.) made this safari the best I have ever enjoyed. Bongi and Norest did a superb job tracking. Eddie’s pleasant demeanor and incredible luck (he picked the winning bait in the leopard pool.) was enjoyable. They were all talented, pleasant and good companions despite the adversity that one always faces on this kind of undertaking. The CM staff was first rate and Crispin’s food was incredible (How can you walk that far for that many days and still gain weight?) Jappie ran a first rate camp (reminiscent of what East Africa must have been like back in the day.) He is also a linguist of no mean proportions. He made Shona sound easy and the guys got a chuckle out of my attempt to be multi-lingual. My only regret is that it is over. Dick Oh yes,since it is Accurate Reloading --both the Hornady 400 DGS and the Swift A-Frame 400 were loaded with 75.0 of RL-15. They were going about 2480 fps and together made one ragged hole at 50 yards. The Nosler Accubond .366 250s were going 2631 ahead of 62.0 RL-15 and was a 3/4 inch load at 100 yards. No complaints about performance. Dick Gunn “You must always stop and roll in the good stuff; it may not smell this way tomorrow.” Lucy, a long deceased Basset Hound " | ||
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Very nice report! Also, to get your other photos to show add the bracket to the front of the code. ~Ann | |||
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Beautiful cat sir and a gret hunt. thanks for sharing. jorge USN (ret) DRSS Verney-Carron 450NE Cogswell & Harrison 375 Fl NE Sabatti Big Five 375 FL Magnum NE DSC Life Member NRA Life Member | |||
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Congratulations on a great hunt, and fine shooting. The cat's a beaut, and the tuskless is a grand animal. I'll be in Dande next March, and you have really whetted my appetite. | |||
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Thanks for a report that lets the reader feel the enjoyment. Nice writing. _________________________________ AR, where the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history become the nattering nabobs of negativisim. | |||
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Excellent report and congrats on a great bag and a grand adventure! On the plains of hesitation lie the bleached bones of ten thousand, who on the dawn of victory lay down their weary heads resting, and there resting, died. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch... Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son! - Rudyard Kipling Life grows grim without senseless indulgence. | |||
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The most hearty of congratulations. Those are fine trophies and great memories. You picked a great group to hunt with and I am sure they added even more to the experience. "Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult." | |||
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Very nice, congratulations! A most enjoyable and refreshing report too. Nice of you to leave the one-tusked warthog for the next lucky client! Love the boss on this buffalo! | |||
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Here's your leopard in a tree pict. Wonderful hunt, superb trophies. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. Steve "He wins the most, who honour saves. Success is not the test." Ryan "Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything." Stalin Tanzania 06 Argentina08 Argentina Australia06 Argentina 07 Namibia Arnhemland10 Belize2011 Moz04 Moz 09 | |||
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Congratulations on your hunt! Brett DRSS Life Member SCI Life Member NRA Life Member WSF Rhyme of the Sheep Hunter May fordings never be too deep, And alders not too thick; May rock slides never be too steep And ridges not too slick. And may your bullets shoot as swell As Fred Bear's arrow's flew; And may your nose work just as well As Jack O'Connor's too. May winds be never at your tail When stalking down the steep; May bears be never on your trail When packing out your sheep. May the hundred pounds upon you Not make you break or trip; And may the plane in which you flew Await you at the strip. -Seth Peterson | |||
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Congratulations.Nice leopard and buff-just super! | |||
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Congrats on your great adventure! | |||
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Welcome to AR Dick and well done on an excellent report. I'm glad that you managed to get that ration buff that I left for you. I hope that you are already planning your next hunt and that we may get the chance to meet again in camp somewhere. Regards Rob | |||
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One of Us |
Very nice. Well done and welcome home. Will J. Parks, III | |||
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One of Us |
Wow...nicely done. Congratulaions !!! | |||
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One of Us |
Thank you for sharing your hunt! Congratulations....FANTASTIC!!!!!! | |||
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One of Us |
Congratulations! great trophies and your amoung great company with Myles as your PH and the rest of the camp staff. "An individual with experience is never at the mercies of an individual with an argument" | |||
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one of us |
Congratulations on a great hunt. Buffalo, leopard and tuskless, nice job. | |||
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One of Us |
Fantastic trip, sir! Thanks for sharing it with us and welcome to AR. | |||
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One of Us |
Great report- thanks! 26 days and I will be doing what you did and hope it comes out close to the same... wonderful report and trophies... Good Hunting, Tim Herald Worldwide Trophy Adventures tim@trophyadventures.com | |||
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One of Us |
Thank you for sharing your story and pictures. I will be leaving July 16 (wow, is it almost here already?!?) to hunt with Rich Tabor of CM Safaris. Reading accounts like yours make the anticipation so much sweeter. | |||
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One of Us |
Great report Dick! Congrates on the game. Looking forward to hunting with Rich Tabor of CM Safaris!! Skip Nantz | |||
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one of us |
Very nice report, beautiful pics, and a good job all around. Mad Dog | |||
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