James.Grage
AH legend
great story and pictures...
Aloha Eric, well we (HPD) and i guess everyone else including feds, state department and community made it thru APEC. Took me a week or more to get my schedule and sleep pattern back in shape. Anyway got my H&S Precision 300 Win Mag scoped with a VX-3 Leupold and had our armourer go thru everything and give it a good cleaning. I picked up 50 rds of ammo (Nosler Partitions) from the guy i bought the rifle from. He reloads and worked up the round to where it was shooting half inch groups. I hate to mess with perfection but will have to work at it to make sure i can shoot close to that keeping in mind not to take five minutes to find the target in the scope hairs. Question Eric? What kind of ear protection did you use? I've seen all kinds of muffs, walker game ear tpyes and such on tv infact just watch a show this morning in Namibia, father daughter combo and she looked like she was only wearing foam inserts. I have tinnitis in my left ear so the higher tones i don't get but still would like some input. I would assume that muffs would not be pratical as they would probably be snatched off my head while going under or around the brush. Take care, i enjoyed reading the post story again. You need to get back out there so that you have another story to write.
Jeff
P.S. now that APEC is over, i'm going to call Geoff.
great story and pictures...
I was just wondering whether you got that new scope....hmmm maybe that new boat took care of that.
Good tale of your trip.
I experienced many of the same roller coaster emotions on my Namibia trip.
Going to "someone else's" farm can get you relegated to the "fun" places to hunt.
That picture of the mountain sure shows what a fun place they wanted to send you.
Glad the tracker took the initiative for you and got lost.
Man, I wish I had shot my Zebra where the truck could get to it. We decided to avoid the time zone jet lag and spend a week a Europe before heading to Namibia this summer. After a few days in the Austrian mountains, I was feeling pretty cocky and thought the Namibian mountains were a joke. That didn't last too long trying to keep up with a very fit PH in his mid twenties scrambling over loose rocks the size of softballs while wading through sticker bushes that must have been selectively bred by Satan's personal gardener. I'm not in bad shape for 43, but I'm not 25, I live in the flatlands near sea level, and work in a hospital, not as a PH. I kept up (barely), but I was respecting the terrain a lot more than when I started.
After running up and down the mountains for a few hours, we found our zebra standing broadside maybe 175 yards away, but apparently at that point my legs were borrowing energy from my brain and I shot it pretty much where the heart would have been if it were facing the other direction. So, my ass-shot zebra took off, perhaps a bit slower than it would have been otherwise and I managed to get another shot in him just as he crested a hill on the other side of the small valley I was shooting across.
So, now we were off at a sprint down the mountain and up the other side, trying to crest the hill before the zebra got to the next hill and we lost sight of him forever. We, or I should say my PH caught up to him due to the fact that I hit a femoral artery and bled him out pretty badly. He was chasing him down the mountain to try to get him closer to where the truck could get to. The zebra was pretty much out of energy by then, so I finished him off.
We broke him down to pieces and then carried him out to the truck piece by piece. My pride wouldn't let me not carry my fair share but by the third or fourth trip back to the truck, I was having a hard time understanding how it could possibly weigh as much as an elephant.
Can't wait to get back and do it again!!!