Went and hunted Hampton Ridge WMA yesterday with some guys from the upstate. They go every year and produce a lot of pork. I’ve talked to them a good bit and have some friends that hunted with them but I hadn’t ever met them before. They invite me down there so I figure what the heck, might as well take the off work and go meet some new friends and kill pigs.
I get down there Wednesday around 7:30pm, they spent the whole day scouting and finding the pig sign. Well I brought a cot and was just gonna sleep outside the truck somewhere. So they said they had room in the motel room for me to crash there. We get ride over there and hangout for a bit, have some cold drinks and talk about the game plan for the hunt. Well around 1:30am i hear dogs raising cane. I go outside and my whole truck is shaking. Dum Dum and Thorn locked up pretty bad. I get them tied off and get back to sleep. We get up at 3:20am, head out to the truck at 3:45am. Well some guys that had a little beef with the guys I was with jumped in trucks and took off as fast as they could. They ended up going to the spot we had planned on after seeing the guys scout it all day. Just trying to screw us over. Oh well, we head to the backup spot where they had seen a big wallow that previous morning.
We get collared up, waiting on official time to hunt, and some guys park a few hundred yards down from us. Well after flashing some lights at them they got up and relocated. We turn out Shane’s dog pepper at the wallow. She smells around, opens up, and starts burning the woods down so we dump the other dogs. We start following behind them and after 45 minutes they show treed, 800yds away. We get 200yds away and don’t hear anything. We get up close and hear a voice. The guys that had parked near us then moved had went right around the corner and dumped their dogs on ours. Well then they kill our pig before we get there. If that ain’t bad enough, they rushed out of there as we were coming in and took half our dang dogs with them.
So here we are, trying to catch up to the dogs and get them back. We finally get back up with them and they say they killed two more pigs. So they killed them running our dogs. We regroup and move to another area. Dogs start running and show treed. Before we can get there they’ve rolled back out. It happens again 30 minutes later close to the same spot. No dogs were cut or hurt, we think someone else got in there and killed the pigs. There were even some guys standing on the sides of the roads with only bulldogs, trying to send them to other peoples bays. Good way to get a whooping right there.
All in all we only had the one confirmed kill, and then we ran a little 100lb pig u til it was past hunting hours and we had to call the dogs off. Had a good time even with all the BS. I got to meet some cool dudes and hunt out of a truck and off roads which is a big change of pace for me. Hopefully next time we won’t have all the drama
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