chris-b and I arrived in Taumarunui midday on Saturday in April, stacked some wood between checking the bow sights.
Which is good as mine had taken a bang the weekend before and was well out. After putting the sight right we left to hunt on a farm I have access to.
On the walk up the hill on the way in I turned to Chris and said 'I feel like I might have to renegotiate our friendship terms and conditions',
to which he looks at me questioning. 'Well, it seem that every time I hang up with you I'm walking up hills' which got a laugh in reply.
The biggest problem hunting on farms I've found is trying to get around stock. So it wasn't surprising we bumped some cattle over the ridge ahead of us.
What was surprising was the 2 stags and 5 hinds we saw below running back onto public land (due to being spooked by the cattle).
Game over. We didn't see anymore deer that night
Sunday
Chris hadn't been trout fishing before so I set him up with a spinning rod and we headed down to the river.
After a couple of hours Chris still wasn't having much luck and I had only got undersized ones with my fly rod. I decide to move us to another spot in hopes of getting chris on a fish.
After about 30mins and two snags later I could see Chris was getting frustrated and had had enough. I asked to have a quick go on the spinner rod as I hadn't used used one in freshwater before.
I tied on a new spinner and first cast hooked up on a small trout. Chris said some rude words. We left soon after that.
We headed back to dad's farm for a midday turkey hunt.
I am really comfortable on shooting inside of 30m but have been working on extending my distances to 40m - 50m. Which didn't seem to make a difference when shooting my bird at a grand total of 10m.
Chris managed to get his with a little bit more leg work.
On the way to the hunting spot we were waived down by some friends of dad to put down a couple of rogue roosters. I took the one in the chook house so Chris could get the other with his bow.
I took with me a bit of metal from the gate hinge and threw it at the bird then put my foot on it to bonk it on the head, which ended up taking a couple to quieten the bird (much to the ladies distress). Chris' bird although roaming freely around the farm was more straight forward with a well placed arrow.
After leaving the rooster massacre we headed up the hill and saw 6pt stag about 500m away working his way up a gully and jump a fence. We decide to cross over the ridge and stalk in his general direction in hope of catching up to him. On our way over to him we were barked at by 4 hinds that neither of us had seen until they were running, didn't see anything else but a had a roaring match with 3 or 4 just on dark.
On Monday we took to the hills again to get another turkey. We bumped a group of them and the started the long uphill chase at walking pace. You wouldn't think that a turkey could walk faster than a human but those birds move quickly without seemingly making an effort. Chris was to take the 1st shot and I was hoping the birds might be flushed my way. No. I used my range finder on them 52m with a steep downhill angle put the 40m pin on it and hit it, yes!
Chris managed to get his second bird on Tuesday morning in the last hours of his final day.
Wednesday I managed to sneak in on a couple of goats.
1 at 40m the second at 42m.
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