How did you get interested in Safari hunting?

[TOM]

How did you become interested in hunting Africa? Did you read books about it? Have a mentor hunter who traveled to Africa? Watch a dvd and decide you wanted to do that? See a mount at Cabelas/Bass Pro/Neighbors house and decide that looks like fun?

There is no right or wrong answer here. I am just curious how everyone got bitten by the "bug".

 

[PAGuardian]

Actually, it started with a Roger Raglin video. I believe it was called "An American whitetail bowhunter bowhunts Africa". After that I picked up all Africa-related reading material I could find. I was around 12 when that happened and the dreaming never stopped. At 21, being a very lucky young man, I went to Namibia and now I'm hooked forever!

 

[Brandon.Gleason]

My love affair with African hunting started the better part of 10-15 years ago watching a cape buffalo hunt on tv back when ESPN had hunting shows on the weekends and I was eating cheerios in my Power Ranger PJ's! I've wanted to do it ever since.

 

[Shallom]

Nice thread... I am fortunate to be born and raised in Tanzania and it all began for me when i turned five and went out on a camping trip with the family and experienced my first pigeon hunt. It went from there and the story continues...

 

[Thunder head]

My facination with africa began by watching Mutual of Omaha's wild kingdom as a boy. As i got older and became more and more interested in hunting magazine articles turned me on th the actual hunting side of it.

It also helps to have a wander lust. I could spend two lifetimes with all the places and things to do in this world of ours.

 

[Calhoun]

...My fascination with Africa began when I was about 10 years old watching the American Sportsmen on TV. Back then my dad told me to quit thinking about Africa as that is for rich people. i kind of always remembered that but I still read every artical that came along in hunting magazines.
...Fast forward to Feb. 2002 my dad had a major heart attack & he was telling me to hurry up & take that Elk hunt you have been talking about forever. "Look at me you never know when your time could be up." Well the wife & I were headed for Florida that stuck in my head the whole trip. I got home & had a new hunting magazine with an artical on Afrca. At the end it said for the price of a decent guided Elk hunt you can come here to our ranch in South Africa & shoot six or more animals for that price. Needless to say I made the call booked & never looked back. I never did go Elk hunting but i really don't care if i do. As for my dad he lived & is ok but i sure love telling him how affordable Africa is & how glad I am that I went twice & will go again! If God allows!!

 

[Big5]

My interest began as a boy in the 50's with the reading of outdoor adventure magazine articles about African safaris and books such as 'Horn of the Hunter' by Robert Ruark.
.

 

[Skyline]

I grew up hunting. When I was three I was going duck hunting with my Dad and great Uncle. I ran around picking up mallards for them and from then on it was a disease with me. I began reading about Africa as soon as I could read and by the time I was 8 years old I could name just about any big game animal in Africa if you flashed a picture in front of me. My bedroom bookcase didn't have Hot Rod magazines, it had books by Ruark, Hunter and Russell.

Calhoun it always saddens me when I see guys make statements like yours..........where an elk hunt isn't even a desire any longer. Unless you have packed in on horses into the northern Canadian Rockies and sat on a ridge bugling for bulls, with grizzlies digging in the rock slides and stone sheep grazing in the high basins above you........well you haven't really experienced what big game hunting in North America is really all about. Sadly few ever do these days.

There are still real elk hunts available and they are affordable if a person wants to do it................ real elk hunting is not about playing the inches game and dropping $25,000 on an exclusive ranch or Indian Reserve where things are reserved for the rich and famous.

Sorry. Did not mean to hijack the thread Tom..........it just saddens me when I see how things have gone and how attitudes have changed.

 

[browningbbr]

spark for interest in hunting Africa?

Let's see... never missed an episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, had to have a toy "Magumba" rifle for Christmas, spent Saturdays every winter riding the bus to the local library to check out all the books about African animals and African hunting, started hunting squirrels with a .410 at age 7, hunting pheasants by myself at age 10.... the list goes on.

It seems every part of my life that was not about my family or my work has led up to hunting in Africa.

I just wish I'd started going to the "Dark Continent" before I was in my mid-50's!

- browningbbr

 

[TRAVEL EXPRESS]

My fascination began in the mid-90's after attending an SCI convention in Reno, which led to reading several of Capstick's books and then finally making our first venture to Zimbabwe in '99. That pretty much says it - hooked from then on and have had some wonderful experiences through southern/central Africa since that time!

 

[buffybr]

Like others wrote, I grew up watching Wild Kingdom and reading the fascinating stories in Outdoor Life and Field and Stream of the seemingly weird and different animals in Africa. My Dad didn't hunt, but he loved the outdoors and taught me to fish and camp. I didn't start to hunt until I roomed with some guys from NW Colorado and I went hunting with them.

When I graduated from college, I made the decision to live near the mountains. My hunting desires grew from just deer and an elk for the freezer to just about all of the big game species that Montana has to offer. I also started shooting some respectable animals of each species, and had them mounted and replaced the animal pictures that I had on my walls with mounts of the real thing.

I had my own horses for 20 years, so for most of those years I would pack a hunting camp into the Montana wilderness, much like Skyline described.

My hunting desires expanded to a DIY Caribou hunt in Alaska, then a backpack Dall sheep and Caribou hunt in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Then in 2000, a friend bought a donated South African Plains Game hunt at a local SCI dinner. They had an extra space available, and my childhood dream of hunting in Africa came true. The Africa bug bit me bad, and I returned in 2005 and 2007.

I will hunt again in Africa, but I'm not sure when. With so many different species of African animals, I decided to hunt different animals on each trip. This has led me to a hunt in Zimbabwe and hunts on 10 different properties in South Africa from the Limpopo River to the hills above East London.

Just like my North American hunting grew from that first spike Muley buck that I shot with my college roommates to 40 years of two full freezers of deer, elk, etc meat and the construction of a 1000 square foot trophy room, my African hunting grew from a childhood dream to many, many wonderful experiences and memories and a very steady income for my taxidermist.

 

[375lvr]

Like others, my facination started with Curt Gowdy and the "American Sportsman" on TV in the 70s. Wasted a lot of good years, but finally went to RSA in 2009. I have vowed to go back every year. I read a quote somewhere "you can borrow money, but you can borrow time" If you haven't gone to Africa yet, GO !!!!! Time is wasting.

 

[Billy Stewart]

Yep wild kingdom with Marlin Perkins and Curt Gowdys show was where it started for me along with books. Been fascinated with it every since then. Then watched hunters like the great Fred Bear bow hunting in Africa. And now i am going this year cant wait to be there. Great thread Tom.:icecream:

 

[billrquimby]

Jack O'Connor's columns and articles in Outdoor Life in the 1950s and 1960s sparked my interest in hunting in Africa and led me to read the classic books by Taylor, Selous, Roosevelt, Hemingway, Ruark and others. My own safari seemed way out of reach until I met C.J. McElroy, the founder of SCI, who hired me to produce the club's publications and sent me on my first trip to Zimbabwe. That was in 1983, and I've returned to that wonderful continent many times since then. Now, at age 73, I'm planning at least one more trip down there.

Bill Quimby

 

[375lvr]

Whoops, I quoted "you can borrow money, but you can borrow time" well I didn't proof read very well.

Should have been "you can borrow money, but you can't borrow time"

Sorry.

 

[Skyline]

375lvr...........you must have better banks than up here. About the only way you can get a loan here is if you already have the money sitting in the bank to cover it and don't really need it in the first place.

Your point is well taken though. As I get older I frequently see people that have always given me the story about all the things they are going to do when they retire...........have the market place decimate their retirement funds or health issues crop up that prevent them from doing much.

Do it while you can and while it is there to do. That is my motto.

 

[monish]

Hi Tom! well hunting comes from within and the bloodline, had seen and been hunting with my granddad, my dad and my dear friends right from the age of 5, in various parts of the world, the love for the wild and the firearms was generic as being from a family of royals u inherit this passion from generations with utmost respect for the sport so the huntbug bitten by birth .

regards

monish

 

[M. Egan]

I started hunting with my dad at a very early age. I read everything I could get on hunting which included Ruark, Capstick , Roosevelt and others. Since I was a child , I have dreamt of hunting cape buffalo, but never thought I could afford it. It turns out I was right. I can't afford it, but I am returning to Africa for a second hunt anyway. Buffalo in Zim.
Having an understanding wife has allowed me to hunt all over Canada, the US and soon a second hunt in Africa. Calhoun, please make that elk hunt. With all my incredible adventures, bowhunting for elk in the Duck Mountains of Manitoba has been at least equal to any other adventure I have had. I have done this hunt over twenty times, always successfuly but not always getting my elk. Killing six or eight animals in South Africa may be cheaper, but you need to do both.
Mike Egan

 

[DUGABOY1]

My family has been hunters for generations before me, and I don’t remember a hunting book or magazine in our home ever before I grew up and married. So I wasn’t impressed with Africa because of the written word. In fact, I never even read Capstick, or Ruark till after I had already hunted Africa.

My interest in African hunting, and double rifles both started when I was six yrs old on a visit with my grandfather to town from our ranch in the north end of the Texas hill country, to the little town of Santa Anna, Texas and to the local hardware store. This was in 1942. I was born in the late 1930s and can’t remember the first time I went hunting with my family, but when I entered the Kelly Hardware store I was hooked.

The high walls were covered with animals, I had only seen in the movies, along with a broad collection of old rifles, and handguns. Mr. Kelly had hunted Africa back in the late 1920s and had collected all those animals mounted there. Mr. Kelly recognized the hunter in me, and took me under his wing. I had just been given my first rifle, and Mod 67 Winchester .22 lr single shot, but I had been hunting with my uncle’s S/S 410 shotgun for some time before that. Mr. Kelly called me to the back counter of his store where he had a scratched up oak, and leather luggage case with shipping labels all over it . He opened it and inside was a big double rifle and all the little gadgets that come in those cases. He took the rifle out, and put it together, and handed it to me cautioning me not to drop it because it was heavy. MAN! Was that thing heavy for a six-year-old skinny kid? He took the rifle back, and handed me one of the cartridges that went in the rifle, WOW that was the biggest cartridge I’d ever seen, and I plucked one of the .22 lr shells out of my pocket and compared them. As I found out later it was a 500/465NE. GEEEZE…………….

Over the next two or three years, every time we went to town, I went to the hardware store to listen to Mr. Kelly’s stories of Africa, and of dangerous game.

From that day on, the little 410 shotgun was a big double rifle, and every jackrabbit I shot was a Cape buffalo, and I was hooked on double rifles, and Africa. Still I was 21 years of age before I got my first double rifle, but have rarely been without at least one till today. Most hunting today is mundane compared to Africa. Once you go to Africa, you are never the same again.:worship:

 

[Billy Stewart]

Dogaboy1 great story i really enjoyed that!!