Thread: First Hunt - GSP/Lab

Good stuff,love the photo with her & the deer ,she has the "l am going to need a bigger bowl "look . Good luck with the training & future hunts

Second hunt for the pup this weekend. This time I thought I'd rip the Band-Aid off and do a fairly big country open tops overnighter. The trip starts with a 600m (that's vertical metres, not horizontal) climb to camp, then a further 100m to a glassing spot, then another 100m to stalk anything on those tops. So a pretty decent mission for a young dog but I thought "bugger it" and away we went.

We set up camp then got into a good area by midday Saturday. No stags seen but I pretty quickly spotted a couple of yearlings, which was good to see but the wind was not right and I couldn't figure out how to get onto them so we spent the rest of the day glassing. Flo even had a hoon on the binos. They were the only deer we saw that day and we were both pretty pooped, so we stalked our way back to camp for an early night.


At first light we stalked to the tops with the breeze into our faces. We arrived just as the sun was hitting the high peaks and glassed for a couple of hours to no avail. The whole area was flooded in sun at this point so if anything was there I should have seen it. But, I had one last scan before we turned around to head back and picked up a couple of spikers making their way from the last shady spot down into the sun. They were 800yd ahead and 300yd to our left. The stalk was on. The wind was into our faces but more from the right so Flo didn't pick up any scent. We were half way into the stalk when the wind swung 180 degrees, which meant it was a race to get parallel or above the deer before they caught our scent. I put Flo in heel and we moved as quickly as possible to get to a shooting position. I put Flo on a stop and crept over a ridge 40m away to find one of the spikers 260 yds off and moving straight towards me showing no signs that it had caught our scent. But the time I caught my breath and set up for the shot, it was 200 yds away and feeding broadside. Flo knew something was up and she was whining a bit - I told her off as quietly as I could but it didn't make any difference, so that's something we'll have to work on. She's never done it before and I've done thousands of stop drills, so I think it was because the heart rate was going and it was all pretty intense. She was quiet enough that the deer never would have heard, so I set up, squeezed off the shot, and watched the spiker drop on the spot. We waited for 10 minutes, then kept climbing til we were 100m upwind of the deer. Flo immediately caught the wind scent and stalked in, indicating as we went. I took a picture of her (below) pointing the deer, when she got first sight of it, before she cautiously moved in for the usual blood lick and fur tug.


Then ensued an 850m descent to the truck with a fairly heavy pack resulting in sore everything. This was another super rewarding hunt and great training for both of us.