SO... Ol' Lee came to me with another lead on a possible property... seems one a his old buddies had a farmer relative up in Tifton GA that had a "hog problem", so we were keen to go check it out... As it seems with the
never ending search for more properties.... for every 10 that you hear about... ONE might actually come through to fruition... fruition in respect to ACTUALLY being able to even hunt it once to see if it's worth a chit...
OF THAT 10 PERCENT.... seems to hold true that less than 10% of that original 10% actually pan out to anything productive.... quite depressing honestly...
But it is the game that we are in, in my area... so it is what it is...
... Drove 3 hours up there after work Friday... got to a property that was supposed to be 3K acres with a "pile" of hogs... and turned out to be 6K acres, with maybe 2 or 3 old, big hogs(maybe), that were traveling doing broadspread damage... The property was mixed woods/creek bottom/crop field, with the only active crop being a wheat/rye patch about 100acres that the hog was rooting up small patches in.
So we get there about 9pm, to a property we'd never been to and those that were there to show us around were straight deer hunters and had no concept of what, or how to show us what we needed... So, they just led us to the "rooting" that had caught there attention... as we inspected it, I could tell it was all old... made by a big hog, no pig(little) tracks... every spot was the same, spotty, spread out rooting on the
edges of the crop fields, most likely just foraging for volunteer p-nuts left on the edges...
...next thing I noticed was the abundance of hard roads surrounding the property...
... to be safe, we kicked our shortest dog Snappa out first to "feel" the property out... she eased along an edge for a while not doing much... so I got aggrevated and kicked out our next shortest dog, Spinner... Spin hit the ground, winded the hog down in a bottom, and it was off to the races... Less than 20 minutes later, both dogs had run clean across all 6K acres after this damn hog, and crossed two hard roads
before we finally got them caught up as they were about to continue down some random river bank we had no possible access to....
... all this with our "short range" dogs lol... I was about ready to go back home at this point...
... beat around for a few more hours, and started to finally get a "feel" for where the hog(or two
) was at... kicked Shine/Camo out in the wee hours of the morning, jumped, and AGAIN.... ran clean off the property... they did bay up for about 10 minutes, but we got maybe 500yds from them in the truck and the hog broke and hauled ass... Old, roaming hogs... been there, done that.... long way to drive to try and outsmart/out muscle one of these types lol...
Oh well, got to check every lead out... never know when it might pan out... that's what I keep tellin' myself anyways HAHAHA
.... sometimes I start to gettin' REAL tired of chasin' properties... I spend more time tryin' to find/keep decent properties these days than
comes CLOSE to the time I actually get to hunt... chit's gettin' real old I got to say....
