Heading up here tomorrow by myself anybody can tell me what I can expect, do I have to push quite far in to find anything and so on.
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Heading up here tomorrow by myself anybody can tell me what I can expect, do I have to push quite far in to find anything and so on.
Never been in there but I’d say you’d have to have a pretty hard look with it being the closest hunting block to Christchurch, be interesting to see how you get on. Good luck!
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Will do buddy , yeah I expect as such but I guess the rifle will mostly be my companion, it’s just a chance to try and scope out the area learn my ways around and if I find something I’ll have a good dinner :)
Head all the way to the hutt and then hit the tops from there man! If you go first and last light I’m sure you’ll see something [emoji106]
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Haven't been up there since I was a teenager but always used to get results on the bush edge morning and night.
ahhh sounds sweet fellas thanks!
Does anyone have a mapped access point, says somewhere along porters pass and lyndon rd, presumably where is passes through the conservation area? is it signposted at all?
ill update you all with photos tomorrow , hopefully dinner will be good! looking for goats!
Also is it acceptable to fire of a couple of shots to make sure your shooting on target (scope and such, taking into account all firearm safety requirements and such) I'm not talking target practise.
Plenty of people do fire sighting in shots when they get to their hunting grounds, but it's like cutting your nose off to.spight your face really. In a heavily hunted block,those animals are real gun shy.
There is a legal access through a station before you get to the bottom of Porters Pass. You do need a 4WD to get to the end of the track. I haven't been up there for a few years but I usually saw a few deer around.
Yes that's Benmore station. You go down Benmore road on the left about half way along the straight.
How’d you get on man?
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Yo tianbotha had a really good day actually , entrance was really easy to find which was a worry at first. Pretty dense bush after the first walk alongside the farm land so that makes it pretty hard to see much (for me anyway) got up to the hut and had spotted a few rabbits by then on the plains. Unsure where to go next I hung out a bit then walked back down the the clearing and stayed there a while but no sightings. Then on my way back I heard some grunting in the bushes that were just over the fence to the farm , pigs! 3 of em but being on the farm land even though just I left em be.
Great day bloody good for your legs haha.
You will learn a little each time you venture out , that's when you will start having success. Good start seeing the pigs next time they might be where you can shoot.
Haha I’d say I was bloody lucky is all. But yeah I’m really keen to hit the same spot again and push on further, I dunno if there’s a cleaning up high where you can get a better view around you.
Yea I easily do 20kms when I go for a day trip there haha, next time get to the hutt and as your facing the door to your right is a ridge line, follow that up and you’ll hit the top of that mountain you follow up the valley, some nice openings when you get to the top! Followed a big old stag a few years ago but it ducked over the valley and back into the tree lineQuote:
Originally Posted by charlie1991
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ahhh right on, awesome, you as i got there i thought it'd just carry on as the thick bush for however long so i thought going back to the clearing was a good idea,Quote:
Originally Posted by TianBotha
right next saturday hitting it again and going to the top, after being these pigs I'm determined to get something back, feeling alot more confident now, thanks for your info it really does help.
Keep looking Charlie,theres a few pigs and deer in the area.
Good on ya Charlie, good luck next time
Charlie, last time I went for a walk in that area there was evidence guys have been accessing the back of Thirteen Mile Bush off the Lake Lyndon road using 2 wheeled motorbikes. They had been going up the ridge just south of Rabbit Hill. You may find the area they can get to off that ridge has had a bit more hunting pressure than others if it is easier for them to get to.
Nice work Charlie, saw this thread a little late.
I was up there early last year and there were a couple of deer in there that got my attention and somewhat closer to than you would have thought to the access points, we walked in from the top of Porters Pass.
We also bumped into other hunters on another trip so no doubt the area has a bit of pressure.
For me seeing them it was a case of slowing well down and just looking, that's me though I was and am pretty eager to keep on walking.
awesome , so I've invested in some cheap but new gum boots as there a lot of water crossings and I'm heading back up this saturday unless it keeps raining like this :/. Fingers crossed ill get some dinner in the meantime ill keep soaking up your info guys, really good stuff!
another day up the bush today and spotted two bigger pigs an followed some red prints for a while right near the entrance , so its been a pretty good day but a hard climb. if i continue on sh73 to lake lyndon, can i just hunt from the mountains there, it seems the majority of the land is ok to hunt but lyndon side would give much easier access to the higher peaks i think the starting elevation is 850 where its taking me 2 hours to walk to 850m at the moment.
I wouldn’t be too worried about the altitude as the deer are after new grass at the moment, and the spring grass growth hasn’t got all that high yet.
My son and I were sitting overlooking a gully at about 900m last Thursday night, not too far from where you are looking. There was new grass, but only in the gully. 3 deer literally trotted out of the Bush about 100m away from us and made a beeline towards the bottom of the gully to feast on the new grass.
In their haste they didn’t notice us sitting in the scrub on the opposite face. Two of them are now in my freezer.
good on you mate! awesome news of success stories over this end and keeping yourself in the food. ill take a drive over that way next time and eye it up, i feel i just struggle in the denseness of the trees from the bender station access until you get passed the hut, hard to see anything i sense it knows your there well before.
I had a look at a map and we were more like 750 metres, not that it really matters.
I am sure you are right - more than likely a lot more deer see us than we see, but the more you look around the more you will be able to judge where you are likely to see them. I would hazard a guess that 10% of the guys on here see 90% of the deer because they know where the deer are likely to be.
We have been really lucky in that early on in my son’s hunting life we stumbled on an area with a lot of deer (not where we were on Thursday) but even in that big valley we really only see deer in the same few areas time after time. Your challenge is to find that spot in the area you are hunting.
A lot of guys want to cover as much ground as possible hoping to stumble on a deer, and good on them if it works for them - when I was younger I certainly did this too.
Nowadays I prefer to find a likely spot and just sit and observe, looking around with the bino’s. Often I see deer that are too far away, but you can learn a lot by sitting and watching them. On Thursday we had been sitting there for an hour and a half before the deer came out, and it was still an hour till dusk. I was beginning to think we weren’t going to see anything, then suddenly there they were.
I have found sometimes you can’t see for looking. One night in this same spot we had been sitting there for at least 30 minutes before I noticed a pig on the hillside opposite us. When I really looked I counted 8 pigs on the hillside, all within 100 metres of us. I hoped like hell my son wasn’t going to shoot the biggest one as we were a 3 hour walk from the car.
Another evening I had been watching this gully for about an hour when all of a sudden there was a deer standing out in the open a long way from any cover. It must have been lying down all that time and just stood up.
I guess what I am saying is that we probably wouldn’t have seen any of these animals if we had just kept walking with only a brief look around.
Yep. Walk a little, look a lot.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sauer
yeh cheers guys , its so easy to go in with so much enthusiasm and just trying to get to the furthest spot , i feel like actually if i just stayed put at the open access point and hung out for the day nice and quietly things could go my way, but you know how it is, this is all the fun of the game. Couldn't think of a better way to spend a day anyway.
Let the binos do the walking.You do the shooting.:thumbsup:
hi mate, enjoying your adventures, keep us posted ! its awesome to see younger crew heading out solo and learning as they go