I got a call mid last week askin to fill a spot on a team for the gator country tourney and managed to get free. Friday night was a complete disaster, not an hour into the hunt we managed to get 4 dogs cut down in the thickest thicket ive ever been in (ive grown up in these woods around saratoga, devers, china and nome and i'll tell you ive never seen anything like this stuff) by 9pm friday night all 3 of my close friend and hunting buddies dogs along with my smoke dog were on the DL with zero hogs in the trailer, not a good feeling......to top that off another team that had permission to hunt the same lands dogs showed at the same bay, all in all over a course of 30 minutes 6 dogs were down between us, we said our good lucks shook hands and parted ways....... Fast forward to 1 am, i blow the rear end out of my rhino, it wont go at all in 2wd and when i get to the first muddy spot the rear end completely locks up.....long story short i had to drive in reverse in 4wd for quite a while to get back to the truck...... Im done for the night!
We being that my good buddy David Coburn got all of his dang dogs cut down i offered to give him one of my smoke pups, a dark masked little devil named slick........BIG MISTAKE lol, him and his brother skeeter both really showed out this weekend, hunted right next to the grown dogs and did what they were bred to do, couldnt ask for any more from em, i'll regret givin him away later but he couldnt go to a better friend than david and i know he will be hunted like he needs to be.
Sat morning and mid day i had errands to run and a benifit skeet shoot to attend. My team went to the marsh and caught a 100 or so pound sow, 3pm saturday 1 dang hog in the trailer......its a start!
Well im buggy-less so i make a call to joshstokley, and he tells me to use his BRAND NEW honda rancher. Josh, if you read this I don't care what everone else says about ya, you are a hell of a friend!
So now im back in the Hunt. We load up and go to a new spot i gained permission to hunt, we bay almost immediately on another sow around 70-80 lbs.....no good weight but hey its a hog! We throw the hog on the fourwheeler and i run to drop it in the trailer, i turned my big brindle curr camo and my 2 6.5month old pups into the same little 30 acre patch of woods in under 5 minutes they came bayed and we my partners dogs showed to the bay and we tie #3, a pretty decent sow, they are gettin bigger and things are startin to look up!
Well we repeat the same thing a third time and my camo dog and a fine brindle bitch id happily keep in my yard named lady owned by artie guillory strike another hog and run him right to us, he managed to give em the slip so we load up and call it a night to get a fresh start this mornin.
We meet up and head to land the artie has run of here in nome (same place we hunted friday night) it was a beautiful mornin to be in the woods, very light breeze, heavy heavy fog and cool. We kick out arties lady dog and my camo dog, they roll out a hair under a mile on a track making a big circle and as we close in on em we get to see all the action, the dogs make up lost ground quick and arties lady bitch gets a mouthful of this boars manhood and camo swallows an ear in the middle of a cut hay field turn another bulldog to em and now we have number 4 tied.
We decide then that if we dont have 5 by 1pm we wont weigh in and will make sausage out of these porkers ......... The dogs end up gettin on a sow with shoats and end up killing shoats to finish out the hunt.
We didnt make it to the weigh in but we still had a blast hunting together this weekend. Got some great woods time and experience in for these young dogs.
It really sucked loosing 4 of our best dogs first thing friday night, it was a big eye opener but it sure was nice to find out that these other dogs can get it done with out the "leaders" in the hunt.
Had a blast and would do it all over again tomorrow if i could!
Thanks to my team mates
Artie Guillory
Brandon Taylor
David Coburn
Can't remember the other dudes name (he backed out saturday morning)
And to brandons buddy Mason who played the helper role all weekend and was a hell of a hand.
Special thanks to Josh Stokley for keepin me in the hunt!
Hope ya'll get a laugh out of my misfortune lol!
Happy huntin folks.
