Thread: A weekend at Rushy's Roost

This weekend past myself, Rushy, Brycey and AndrewH headed into Whirinaki regional park for a hunt, a feast (courtesy of Rushy) and a spot of shit-talking.

We left on Friday and arrived at Rushy's Roost with time to set up everything before the sun set. We were a bit dismayed at seeing 1080 signs up at the road end, but ah well. Rushy's takes to a weekend in the outdoors with the sentiment "Anyone can be uncomfortable in the bush...", something a sergeant of his taught him back when he was in the army. I think the photo speaks for itself


Once we'd set everything up, we lit the fire, shared a few stories and even had a kiwi making noises no more than 25m from the camp - that was pretty cool. After that we hit the hay.

In true Rushy fashion, we were woken to the sound of sizzling bacon and eggs and the coffee brewing. After we'd finished, we headed towards the hunting grounds. We were following an old logging track and we came across some sign almost immediately, which, along with the morning birdsong, was encouragement that the 1080 hadn't raped the place entirely. We spooked a deer and heard it crashing through the bush within an hour of starting the hunt. Frustrated that we couldn't get a look at it: it knew we were there before we knew it was, but like the other sign, it was encouragement. We carried on to an old wallow that Rushy knew but there was no fresh sign so we figured it wasn't in use at the moment. Next stop was a clearing that wasn't too far past the wallow. It had some fresh sign on it but the owners of the ass-pellets were gone by the time we were there. We tracked North along a ridge and set up a vantage point to see if we couldn't intercept an animal travelling from its feeding ground. After an hour of lying on the cold ground, we decided to carry on southward across a gully which had a plateau above it which deer frequent. It was a steep slog going up the otherside and we joked with Rushy that if he couldn't make it back to camp, we'd happily carry him, but fuck it, we were only gonna take his back-steaks

When we got up to the plateau on the other side we found some fresh sign, probably less than 2 hours old. So we got into super silent mode and made our way west along the plateau and towards the clearing. We didn't see anything on the plateau. We found some fairly fresh sign on the clearing and sat down on the edge of it for to eat our lunches, have a break and hope some unlucky deer wanders onto it. Rushy told me that during the roar he had camped on the edge of the clearing in his henessey hammock and had the sounds of roaring and dueling stags within 50m from him all night! Anyway after a while I took a little nap and was woken by Rushy saying we were going to head back to camp.

We tracked back down to the bottom of that gully and followed the stream westward until we hit a possum trackers track that took us north back right to our doorstep. It was a really great walk through some pretty forestry - here's a couple photos



When we made it back, we put on the coffee, took off our boots and cranked up the fire for Rushy to make scones with in the Dutch oven (which, by the way, he is a genius with ). Fresh home baking out in the bush, here's Rushy and Brycey with the product:



Later that night Rushy treated us to a roast chicken meal also done in the Dutch oven over the fire. I wish I had a photo but I forgot to take one. Anyway, that night we sat around the fire for more shit-talking and had a few beers. We had to leave fairly early on sunday morning, so with not enough time for a hunt, we took a gentleman's approach to it, having a sleep in and a breakfast of bacon and eggs before packing up and heading off.

Cheers AndrewH, Brycey and Rushy for a damn good weekend away. I look forward to more like these to come.

Phillipgr