16 September 2014, 17:35
subsailor74Save Conservancy Hunt - Matendere Ranch
My best friend Ken Williams and I just completed an 11 day hunt at Matendere Ranch in the Save Conservancy with PH Mike Payne of Save Safaris. Rather than do a day by day accounting of the hunt, I thought I would just show some of the results. In summary, it was a fabulous hunt. We were into buffalo twice a day, every day, but we lacked a little bit of luck in connecting with a trophy bull. Both Ken and I were holding out for very large bulls, and in doing so we passed on several buffalo we would have gladly taken on previous safaris. By "into buffalo", I mean we were within 20 yards of shootable animals. As we were both hunting with iron sighted double rifles, this was where we wanted to be. As Matendere had not been hunted for the last couple of years due to lack of permits, we were interested in how the game had faired. Suffice it to say the plains game was there in abundance. We had never seen as many huge kudu bulls, as many trophy nyala, and as many really nice waterbuck as we had seen before. The buffalo, elephants, and lions were there as well, and we encountered some real dandies of all of them.My first trophy was a very large civet - I shot this guy with my .17 HMR, and as it turned out, we shot this little rifle more than any of the others on this hunt. I provided a separate writeup on it in the Small Calibers section of this site.
Ken took this huge genet with the .17 HMR.
We both took very nice nyala bulls.
Waterbuck were there in abundance - Ken shot a beauty, mine was smaller than his, but still a nice one.
There were also plenty of nice warthogs around - we both shot good ones.
.....and the goal for me on this hunt was to shoot a buffalo with Owain Lewis's WJ Jeffery .475 No. 2 Jeffery NE double rifle. I told Mike Payne from the onset I would shoot an old cow, and that is exactly what I did. There is more info about the rifle in the Double Rifles section of this site.
....and finally, a photo of a couple of dagga boys on safari. At least we used to be dagga boys....I think the trackers refer to us as a couple of madalas now!
.....one last piece to the story. Early in the hunt, I told Mike Payne I would gladly shoot an eland for camp meat - in my estimation, the best there is - but I did not want to shoot a trophy bull. Mike said he had a few eland cows on quota, but he had not priced them yet as nobody seemed interested in them. I offered that a cow buffalo was ΒΌ the price of a bull, so an eland cow should go for $300. As we haggled back and forth like a scene from the flea market in Harare, Mike finally said there was "no way" he was going to let me shoot an eland for 300 bucks. A few days later as we were driving back to camp, a huge herd of eland cows was crossing the road in front of us. Mike turned to me and said. "OK - 300 bucks - get out and shoot one of those cows so we can have it for dinner tomorrow night". I happily obliged, and those inside fillets the next night were better than any steak I have had here in the States.
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