Prehunt rituals, traditions, and superstitions.

T-bob, I was right there with you for a LONG while lol, turn the dogs out and realize that I never turned the collars on......... nowdays i fixed that and I guess it would be considered a "ritual" since I do it religiously every hunt.

I wait until I get to where im hunting to collar my dogs. I turn on all of my tracking collars and put em all in a pile on the tailgate turned on, I grab em one at a time and put them on the dogs then once all dogs are collared I go through and delete every collar off of my handheld and re-add them each with the right dogs name on the collar. I have noticed a couple things since I started doing this. 1) my collars seem to work better when I deleted them and re-add them to the system (no idea why but I seem to have less problems when I reset them every hunt) 2) if I were to leave each collar as is and not delete and re-add them sometimes I wouldn't realize that a collar wasn't working correctly until after the dog was turned out and I was trying to find it, since I started deleting and re-adding them I know long before I drop a dog if one of my collars is acting up or is broken because my garmin won't re-add it when it tells me to touch the handheld to the collar. May not work for everyone but it works for me.

Another thing I have started doing is keeping a hunting log going before each hunt, not sure if anyone else even knows about it lol but I keep a small notebook in my center console and before I hunt I write down pretty much any and everything that I can about the hunt, everything from weather conditions to the property to the dogs and people on the hunt. No reason really other than I like being able to look back and remember all the specifics of a hunt.