Monday 23.10 (day 4)
New day, old tricks. I was woken up at 4:00AM to a splash that either a croc or a hippo made. There were both just 20 meters from my tent. Every night also the Waterbuck would come and feed on the grass just meters from the tent. They are surprisingly loud when the feed.
Had the normal breakfast, yoghurt and some fruits + healthy overdose of coffee and we were on our way. Today we would be checking the baits. Additionally we put out 2 new ones. Now we had a total of 11 baits out. The baits did not have hits, but luckily there are plenty of days to go still. There is plenty of Leopard activity and the full moon is still long ahead so there should be a reasonable chance to get the Leopard. In the morning we visited the dinosaur tracks as we had a bait close to them. Pretty cool to see something so old.
We also found fresh tracks of nice group of daggaboys, but Buffalos were certainly not a priority today. Pierre had noticed that I was not happy with my performance with the Buffalo so he mentioned that there is a second bull available. I answered to come back to that after I have gotten something with my own rifle. Now it’s focus on 1) getting my self confidence back + 2) Leopard. After that, who knows
Today there was also another hunter (Tom from Australia) hunting with Lindon Stanton. Tom ended up getting his Buffalo on first day of hunting. Not bad
. The area is certainly big enough to have couple of hunters at the same time. And it was nice to have more company in the camp.
Today I also saw Roan for the first time ever. There was a nice male in the group and we would see the same group of Roan also during the following days. It’s always nice to see something you have never seen before. I hope to also see a Lion in the coming days. Although I have seen Lion before, I have never seen them outside national parks. Pierre mentioned earlier that so far this year they have seen Lion in all their Safaris so the probability for that is quite high. And we certainly have seen a lot of tracks. Chewore has a quota of only 1 male Lion per year and no females are hunted. As a result there is overpopulation of Lion and that combined with plenty of Hyena and a “few” Leopard are certainly taking their toll on plains game. On the other hand that ensures that game is alert all the time which makes hunting more challenging and fun.
Tuesday 24.10 (day 5)
Morning was spent on checking baits (4 checked) and putting a new one up. Checking one bait usually means driving from 30 minutes to one hour from bait to another, dragging a smelly drag for quite some distance, spreading a combination of blood, stomach content and some mysterious other (smelly) substances near the bait and the bait tree. Unless you have hunted Leopard, the smell of the bakkie at this stage of the hunt is something that can not be described. I would say that the bakkie starts to smell worse than the bait that has been rotting 4 days. There is also plenty of Tse Tse flies to make sure you have the full Leopard hunting experience. For me the extra thing is sunblock combined with sand so that sweat, sunblock and sand build nice combination of odors inside your hunting cap. I do love hunting! To my surprise I didn’t get any sunburns during this trip so I consider myself lucky.
We have now totally 12 baits in the area waiting for the cat to come in. No hits so far. Should I get nervous? Anyway, now we have established route for 2 day bait checking. 5 baits will be checked one day and 7 baits on the following day. Each round of checking baits is roughly half day trip. During these trips we will also keep an eye out for other game.
After lunch time break we had a walk through a dry riverbed. It took some 40 minutes to get from camp to the start point. I didn’t realize it then, but the plan was to walk back to camp. The distance back when walking would be significantly shorter, but still a nice walk of around 2-2.5 hours. During the walk we saw Hippos and found a Crocodile’s nest. It was a very nice walk, but unfortunately nothing worth shooting was spotted. We were mainly after a Bushbuck or a Kudu (or anything exceptional). There was plenty of Bushbuck tracks and we saw some female as well as several Waterbucks (also an ok male). Best part of the walk was the scenery and it was really nice for a change to be walking. When we returned to camp, we found out that Tom had shot a 58,5” Kudu. It looked great! And the cold beer tasted great after the walk. All in all, just another day in the office.