Sunday, March 16, 2014

I'm not sure that 1,000 rounds would have helped me...

The last couple of goose expeditions I've been on have been kind of lean pickings from a harvest perspective (by my own choice & circumstances I've avoided or missed a couple of the productive sessions the boys have had lately), but man there's been some birds to be seen - in the past 2 hunts I've seen at least a thousand geese and only shot one.....

950 (ok, ok that's just a wild stab in the dark, there was a shitwack of birds..) of those thousand came in gabbling mobs, circling our paddock sounding like migratory goose-herds. We were set up in a paddock, all 8 of us (its not easy hiding 8 people) as mobs swirled from the left, right and behind, looking down at our spread before deciding something wasn't quite right and moving on. It's hard to be pissed off when you get to see a sight like that.

How good was our camo?

Blind - well camo'd



Good enough I think. Were we on the X? Yeah, the place was layered in kak, even the bright white troughs were surrounded and the birds should've been used to those by now...

So there was another reason, perhaps the fading wind and the shots taken at the first mob that arrived had unsettled the local population. Never mind, it was a sight I'll never forget.

The other 50 (making up the 1,000) geese were seen on an evening hunt where only one mob came in, (and they did so beautifully, feet down in the breeze). 13 came in and most of them left. I took my first bird, watched the mob split, followed 2 birds to the right and didn't fire as they went into Tony's zone, swung back to cover birds going out and rather pathetically emptied my mag well above the bird I was chasing (yup, head not down on stock, an affliction that gets me now and again).

I giggled because I don't get that hung up on shooting disasters and also because our plan looked like a spectacular success and because well, just because. That was the only mob that came our way, the rest just flew on and on and on... so much for spectacular successes.

When I arrived home SWMBO pushed a package at me - turns out my Briley extension mag had arrived. I fitted it and sat back to revel in the joyous fact that from 5 shots originally,  I had now almost doubled my gun's capacity! Yeah!


 

The fact is that I can now pack in more rounds than I've fired in 2 hunts. On the past couple of hunts, I'm not sure that if I had 1,000 rounds at my disposal it would have helped particularly.... *sigh*

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