Day 6
Headed out this morning in hopes of locating a nice Kudu bull for my father. We headed back to the hills where we had harvested the zebra, and my dad had missed his first opportunity at a quality bull earlier in the trip. We stopped several times, glassing for 15min or so in each spot and ended up a nice vantage point and sat down to glass miles of hillside in quite a beautiful setting. We were so fortunate to have great weather during our time at Khomas Highlands, and this morning turned out to be as nice as every other. After some time with many different animals spotted, we located a herd of 7-8 Kudu with 3 bulls in the group. Two were a bit younger and hanging out with the cows, but even at a significant distance, we could see a mature bull with much darker horns hanging out above the group rubbing his horns in a tree. We started down the hill towards the group, and Erik heads back to the truck to start moving into a better position for pickup of *hopefully* a nice Kudu for my father.
We got into better position to truly evaluate the bull, and all agreed that it was a old male, not quite as big as mine but several years older with some great character to his horns. My dad setup for the shot, and with my rangefinder pinging at 348 yards, a quick dope adjustment was made and my dad hammered his bull! I watched the solid hit through my binoculars, and he went maybe 10 yards forward and fell behind a tree. When my dad recovered from the recoil and looked through the scope, he was a bit concerned because he could see the ass end of the group cresting the hill above where he had taken his bull and he was a bit worried his shot hadn't connected where he had placed the reticle. I assured him that it was down, and we headed towards the brush.
My dads shot had hammered both lungs with a nice frothy exit wound on the far side, and likely taken out the top end of the heart. Perfect shot!
His bull had a very unique rack that measured at 47/48" and Adab and Erik guessed he was over 12 years old, a perfect trophy!
After the excitement of the morning, and with a few more days ahead of us, we decided to take the evening off and give everyone a bit of rest. We decided to walk the perimeter of a new high fence refuge Philip had just completed with some .22s in hopes of taking some guinea fowl for schnitzel but we never came across any within shooting distance in the evening. The night was great as we had grown to expect with quite a few G&Ts by the fireplace and more stories to go around. Day 6 was on the books and at this point we had already taken everything on our list! Definitely not something we had expected to do, but a testament to the amount of animals on the Khomas Highlands, as well as a great PH staff.