BigUglyMan
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- New Scotland
OK, ok, I've been back for a couple of weeks now and thought I should do my thread. The wife is next door having tea and the baby is sleeping so here goes...
We left Canada on July 15th from Calgary. Our routing took us from Calgary through London Heathrow through O.R. Tambo in Johannesburg, and on to Harare. From Harare we chartered into the Zambezi Valley. A brief thought on air travel. If I were doing it again, I would go to JFK and fly direct to Johannesburg with South African Airways. The flight is about 13 hours on a Boeing 777 which beats the backside off 9 hours to London, 8 hrs on the ground there and 11 hours to Jo'burg on the Airbus A330 and A340. You know your air travel is suspect when the Air Canada portion (Calgary to London) was the best leg. We flew with Virgin Atlantic from London to Jo'burg and, let me assure you, I am no longer a Virgin virgin. In fact, I'd rather have a sore backside than fly with them again. I'm not an overly wide-arsed fellow, but the seats on the A340 were so narrow that if I didn't hold onto the seatbelt and it slipped between my hips and the seat I would have to stand up in order to fish it out. Worse than that, when I did sit down with my butt as far back in the seat as it would go, my knees still touched the back of the seat in front of me. The only thing that kept me from a total embolism was the fact that the flight attendant moved me to a bulkhead row. Then it was only my arse that was squeezed.
We were met on the gate side of immigration in Harare by our pilot Sully of Safari Air Services. He got us through Immigration (complete with a $75 USD rogering for a visitor visa) and customs. In under 40 minutes we were flying out of Harare in a shiny Cessna 206 headed for the Tafika fishing camp on the Zambezi River.
Best idea ever. Two days of fishing and casual pontoon boating was the ticket for getting over the jet lag. Or, in theory. Word to the wise - drink lots of water and wear your damned hat! You don't want heat exhaustion like I got. 12 hours of firehose poops and the shivers is no fun. Plus I missed supper which was home-made fish and chips. But I was 75% in 14 hours and back to right in 24 hours. We met our PH, Ian Gibson, when he picked us up from Tafika and drove us to Chifuti Safari's Kachoe camp. The camp consisted of three tents with two beds each on the bank of the Kachoe River. The dining area was outside but under cover. Beautiful fire pit and a view of the animals as they wandered through the clearing and river bed.
The hunting started off rather slow. There were late rains this year and still a lot of water in the rivers and pans. As a result the buffalo weren't moving as much and didn't have to cross the road as often. Worse still, Chewore South is very grassy so when you did happen onto a Dagga Boy track, you lost it within a couple of hundred yards of the road. Very frustrating.
What we saw a lot of in the first three days were warthogs. We must have seen 6 big warthogs but they all managed to give us the slip. Until day 3, that is. I saw him out the left side of the truck and was nearly out of the truck before it stopped. I could see his tusks were big even as we drove. Gibbo and I stalked to where we had last seen him but there was no sign of him, despite being in a fairly large clearing. Then, without warning, he jumped up out of a patch of long grass the size of a billiard table and trotted away at a 45 degree angle. Gibbo just pointed with the sticks and I threw the rifle up. This is a situation where the lighted post on the reticle of the Trijicon scope paid it's dues. As the amber triangle crossed Pumba's shoulder I squeezed off the shot. We ran to where the pig had stood and I saw the tree. A 3" Mopane tree had nearly been chopped in half by the 300gr Hornady DGX bullet. I felt a sense of relief and thought "good, I hit the tree so it should be a clean miss". No such luck. Blood. Dammit. So the tracking began. The blood was very sporadic at first but then turned heavier after a couple hundred yards. Then some watery blood with stomach contents in it. Expletive Deleted. but there was still a fairly heavy blood trail so I started to feel optimistic. We tracked some more and suddenly up jumped the warthog. Gibbo snapped off a shot from his 458 and the pig bolted for the hills. On arrival at where he had stood we found a good pool of blood indicating that he had laid up and was hurt badly. So off we tracked some more. This went on for almost 3 hours. Gibbo and I walked to the right of the trackers in case we saw the pig and could get a shot at him. I looked over at the trackers and saw that my brother was walking about 7 yards to their left. I raged. I told that dumb little sh*t to stay with us. Then he threw up his 30-06 and ripped off a shot, startling the trackers and PH. Turns out the warthog had been lying off to the left and stood up as we approached. Matt drove a 180 grain Ballistic Silvertip through him behind the shoulders and off he went. "Sorry guys, no time for a warning". A short follow up later and another 300gr DGX through the shoulders and it was all over. A monster pig, estimated at 14" of tusk. Gibbo reckoned it was the second biggest he'd ever shot with a client. He was old and in poor condition, having lost a lot of the meat from his front quarters. Perfect pig to shoot. I doubt I'll ever see a bigger one, let alone shoot one. We let the guts out of him and carried him back to the truck - a significant jaunt.
About 5PM that day we found fresh tracks and spoor of a herd of buffalo. Likely from the morning trip to water, it was too late in the day to set off after them, but we planned to go after them the following morning. And at 6:45 AM we left the truck to see where these buffalo had gone. We hiked and hiked and eventually found where they had spent the night. We continued and the spoor got fresher and fresher. As we tracked we came upon a small herd of elephant at about 50 yards. We circled down wind and tried to go around, only to bump into another herd, this time a cow-calf herd. Bad business. We circled downwind again and thought we were clear. Wrong. More cows and calves downwind of us. They smelled us and were coming to investigate. "Run". All I needed to hear from the PH. Until my brother stopped for a leak. We'll be teasing him about that for a long time. So by this time we'd seriously lost the trail so the three trackers and one game scout split up to search out the spoor. Knowing our limitations, Gibbo, Matt and myself sat down to rest and wait for news. Well, sitting in the warm sun and relaxing is a dead certain recipe for one thing - snoozing. As I was dozing off I became aware of a diesel-engine rumbling in the distance. Funny, I thought, we're on the west side of the concession...shouldn't be anyone here. I looked at Gibbo about the same time he heard it - "ELEPHANTS". We jumped up to see Robert, the tracker, hightailing towards us. "Elephants" he told us. I looked past Robert to see an elephant coming out of the bush 25 yards away. "Holy f--k, there he is!" I said as I pointed, as though a 12,000 lb animal that is sauntering inbound at 25 yards needs pointing out. Off went 49 year old Robert like a shot, and me glued to his fleeing backside. Down through a dry river and up the hill on the far side. He stopped, and so did I. The thought occurred to me that we certainly hadn't run far enough from these damned elephants, but Gibbo and my not-so-fleet-afoot brother joined up with us in short order. No sign of the elephants. But as luck would have it, as we regrouped and got out affairs in order, we were back on the spoor. Thank you, damned elephants. As we got sorted out, the damned buffalo stood up from the long grass 35 yards from us. We all sank down and Gibbo scanned what he could see of the herd. The buff decided that they weren't enamored of the bush and off they went, crossing onto a plateau slightly above us. We circled downwind and climbed through a narrow riverbed with steep sides to get to a position to glass the herd. I just stayed low - I know enough to know when I should be glassing and when I should have my rifle ready to get into action. Gibbo glassed for a long while, then set up the sticks and beckoned me up. He pointed out the bull to me and I looked him over. Very nice bull, likely no more than 35" wide and his tips were still high. I looked at him for a long while and when Gibbo asked me if I wanted him I told him No, that I was hoping for something older and with more drop to his horns. We watched them for a little while and the herd moved off. I wondered if I might regret turning this one down as the spoor had been so hard to find up til this point. I figured that we were done with that herd but to my surprise Gibbo led me up to the edge of the plateau to see the herd feeding down the hill. Gibbo glassed the herd a bit more and then, after about a half hour, he set up the sticks and beckoned me onto them. "There are three bulls. These two and the one behind the tree. The one behind the tree has great bosses but is likely only 35" wide". I watched the two smaller bulls, the one I turned down earlier and another similar one. I could see the bigger bull behind the tree and resolved to wait for him. Eventually, after about 5 minutes, the bull emerged from the shelter of the tree and walked out, stopping in front of a calf. I held my fire as we waited for him to turn clear and come broadside. The bull eventually stepped clear but turned face-on to us. "If you're comfortable, take him" Gibbo told me. I didn't like the frontal shot, even though I was dead solid. I had the 3-9x scope cranked all the way up to 4x which looked great as the amber triangle floated on the bull's chest. After a minute or two the bull turned to the right and started to walk away, slowly. "That's it, whack him" urged my PH. I watched the amber aimpoint settle into Kevin Robertson't "Vital Triangle", nice and low on the shoulder. The rifle went off almost without my conscious thought, as though I willed it to fire. As I rocked back in recoil I cycled the bolt with authority, driving the backup round from the magazine into a full jam. I quickly cleared the jam and slammed the round home. I later found that whatever had caused the jam had driven the bullet back into the case to the point that it was resting on the powder charge and able to be pulled back and forth in the case. But I digress. The freshly reloaded rifle came back to my shoulder as the herd ran up the opposite hill. I couldn't see where my bull was and felt a moment of panic. Then I heard that sound. Not everyone hears it, but it sounded like a guttural bovine sigh of relief to me. Gibbo and I charged down the hill and were quickly joined by the incredibly swift Robert. We found the buffalo quickly, down no more than 20 yards from where I shot him. He was in the last throes, twitching a bit and expired within a minute of our arrival on scene. I didn't even get to, or have to, fire a second shot. There he was. my buffalo. I had always resolved that I would never touch a buffalo horn until it was my buffalo horn. I ran my hands over the knurled boss and deep, thick, hooks of the horns. My shot had impacted perfectly through the shoulder and not exited. As we rolled him into a position for a few quick pics, I checked my pedometer to see how far it said we'd walked. 15 miles. I'm not sure that I've ever walked that far in my life. Then the happy news - we had to walk back to the truck. Off we set at Gibbo 5.6km/h standard walking speed. 3 miles later we were quenching our thirst at the truck and headed for a nearby recovery road that lead within 40 yards of the buffalo's final resting place. Photos were taken before the great beast was loaded whole into the truck for the trek back to camp. When we got back there the kitchen foreman, my mom's adopted favourite, radioed her and the camp manager to tell them of our success, prompting them to abandon their supply run to the Chenji Camp and return to celebrate.
Will I be back there? You be the judge. More story to follow later.
We left Canada on July 15th from Calgary. Our routing took us from Calgary through London Heathrow through O.R. Tambo in Johannesburg, and on to Harare. From Harare we chartered into the Zambezi Valley. A brief thought on air travel. If I were doing it again, I would go to JFK and fly direct to Johannesburg with South African Airways. The flight is about 13 hours on a Boeing 777 which beats the backside off 9 hours to London, 8 hrs on the ground there and 11 hours to Jo'burg on the Airbus A330 and A340. You know your air travel is suspect when the Air Canada portion (Calgary to London) was the best leg. We flew with Virgin Atlantic from London to Jo'burg and, let me assure you, I am no longer a Virgin virgin. In fact, I'd rather have a sore backside than fly with them again. I'm not an overly wide-arsed fellow, but the seats on the A340 were so narrow that if I didn't hold onto the seatbelt and it slipped between my hips and the seat I would have to stand up in order to fish it out. Worse than that, when I did sit down with my butt as far back in the seat as it would go, my knees still touched the back of the seat in front of me. The only thing that kept me from a total embolism was the fact that the flight attendant moved me to a bulkhead row. Then it was only my arse that was squeezed.
We were met on the gate side of immigration in Harare by our pilot Sully of Safari Air Services. He got us through Immigration (complete with a $75 USD rogering for a visitor visa) and customs. In under 40 minutes we were flying out of Harare in a shiny Cessna 206 headed for the Tafika fishing camp on the Zambezi River.
Best idea ever. Two days of fishing and casual pontoon boating was the ticket for getting over the jet lag. Or, in theory. Word to the wise - drink lots of water and wear your damned hat! You don't want heat exhaustion like I got. 12 hours of firehose poops and the shivers is no fun. Plus I missed supper which was home-made fish and chips. But I was 75% in 14 hours and back to right in 24 hours. We met our PH, Ian Gibson, when he picked us up from Tafika and drove us to Chifuti Safari's Kachoe camp. The camp consisted of three tents with two beds each on the bank of the Kachoe River. The dining area was outside but under cover. Beautiful fire pit and a view of the animals as they wandered through the clearing and river bed.
The hunting started off rather slow. There were late rains this year and still a lot of water in the rivers and pans. As a result the buffalo weren't moving as much and didn't have to cross the road as often. Worse still, Chewore South is very grassy so when you did happen onto a Dagga Boy track, you lost it within a couple of hundred yards of the road. Very frustrating.
What we saw a lot of in the first three days were warthogs. We must have seen 6 big warthogs but they all managed to give us the slip. Until day 3, that is. I saw him out the left side of the truck and was nearly out of the truck before it stopped. I could see his tusks were big even as we drove. Gibbo and I stalked to where we had last seen him but there was no sign of him, despite being in a fairly large clearing. Then, without warning, he jumped up out of a patch of long grass the size of a billiard table and trotted away at a 45 degree angle. Gibbo just pointed with the sticks and I threw the rifle up. This is a situation where the lighted post on the reticle of the Trijicon scope paid it's dues. As the amber triangle crossed Pumba's shoulder I squeezed off the shot. We ran to where the pig had stood and I saw the tree. A 3" Mopane tree had nearly been chopped in half by the 300gr Hornady DGX bullet. I felt a sense of relief and thought "good, I hit the tree so it should be a clean miss". No such luck. Blood. Dammit. So the tracking began. The blood was very sporadic at first but then turned heavier after a couple hundred yards. Then some watery blood with stomach contents in it. Expletive Deleted. but there was still a fairly heavy blood trail so I started to feel optimistic. We tracked some more and suddenly up jumped the warthog. Gibbo snapped off a shot from his 458 and the pig bolted for the hills. On arrival at where he had stood we found a good pool of blood indicating that he had laid up and was hurt badly. So off we tracked some more. This went on for almost 3 hours. Gibbo and I walked to the right of the trackers in case we saw the pig and could get a shot at him. I looked over at the trackers and saw that my brother was walking about 7 yards to their left. I raged. I told that dumb little sh*t to stay with us. Then he threw up his 30-06 and ripped off a shot, startling the trackers and PH. Turns out the warthog had been lying off to the left and stood up as we approached. Matt drove a 180 grain Ballistic Silvertip through him behind the shoulders and off he went. "Sorry guys, no time for a warning". A short follow up later and another 300gr DGX through the shoulders and it was all over. A monster pig, estimated at 14" of tusk. Gibbo reckoned it was the second biggest he'd ever shot with a client. He was old and in poor condition, having lost a lot of the meat from his front quarters. Perfect pig to shoot. I doubt I'll ever see a bigger one, let alone shoot one. We let the guts out of him and carried him back to the truck - a significant jaunt.
About 5PM that day we found fresh tracks and spoor of a herd of buffalo. Likely from the morning trip to water, it was too late in the day to set off after them, but we planned to go after them the following morning. And at 6:45 AM we left the truck to see where these buffalo had gone. We hiked and hiked and eventually found where they had spent the night. We continued and the spoor got fresher and fresher. As we tracked we came upon a small herd of elephant at about 50 yards. We circled down wind and tried to go around, only to bump into another herd, this time a cow-calf herd. Bad business. We circled downwind again and thought we were clear. Wrong. More cows and calves downwind of us. They smelled us and were coming to investigate. "Run". All I needed to hear from the PH. Until my brother stopped for a leak. We'll be teasing him about that for a long time. So by this time we'd seriously lost the trail so the three trackers and one game scout split up to search out the spoor. Knowing our limitations, Gibbo, Matt and myself sat down to rest and wait for news. Well, sitting in the warm sun and relaxing is a dead certain recipe for one thing - snoozing. As I was dozing off I became aware of a diesel-engine rumbling in the distance. Funny, I thought, we're on the west side of the concession...shouldn't be anyone here. I looked at Gibbo about the same time he heard it - "ELEPHANTS". We jumped up to see Robert, the tracker, hightailing towards us. "Elephants" he told us. I looked past Robert to see an elephant coming out of the bush 25 yards away. "Holy f--k, there he is!" I said as I pointed, as though a 12,000 lb animal that is sauntering inbound at 25 yards needs pointing out. Off went 49 year old Robert like a shot, and me glued to his fleeing backside. Down through a dry river and up the hill on the far side. He stopped, and so did I. The thought occurred to me that we certainly hadn't run far enough from these damned elephants, but Gibbo and my not-so-fleet-afoot brother joined up with us in short order. No sign of the elephants. But as luck would have it, as we regrouped and got out affairs in order, we were back on the spoor. Thank you, damned elephants. As we got sorted out, the damned buffalo stood up from the long grass 35 yards from us. We all sank down and Gibbo scanned what he could see of the herd. The buff decided that they weren't enamored of the bush and off they went, crossing onto a plateau slightly above us. We circled downwind and climbed through a narrow riverbed with steep sides to get to a position to glass the herd. I just stayed low - I know enough to know when I should be glassing and when I should have my rifle ready to get into action. Gibbo glassed for a long while, then set up the sticks and beckoned me up. He pointed out the bull to me and I looked him over. Very nice bull, likely no more than 35" wide and his tips were still high. I looked at him for a long while and when Gibbo asked me if I wanted him I told him No, that I was hoping for something older and with more drop to his horns. We watched them for a little while and the herd moved off. I wondered if I might regret turning this one down as the spoor had been so hard to find up til this point. I figured that we were done with that herd but to my surprise Gibbo led me up to the edge of the plateau to see the herd feeding down the hill. Gibbo glassed the herd a bit more and then, after about a half hour, he set up the sticks and beckoned me onto them. "There are three bulls. These two and the one behind the tree. The one behind the tree has great bosses but is likely only 35" wide". I watched the two smaller bulls, the one I turned down earlier and another similar one. I could see the bigger bull behind the tree and resolved to wait for him. Eventually, after about 5 minutes, the bull emerged from the shelter of the tree and walked out, stopping in front of a calf. I held my fire as we waited for him to turn clear and come broadside. The bull eventually stepped clear but turned face-on to us. "If you're comfortable, take him" Gibbo told me. I didn't like the frontal shot, even though I was dead solid. I had the 3-9x scope cranked all the way up to 4x which looked great as the amber triangle floated on the bull's chest. After a minute or two the bull turned to the right and started to walk away, slowly. "That's it, whack him" urged my PH. I watched the amber aimpoint settle into Kevin Robertson't "Vital Triangle", nice and low on the shoulder. The rifle went off almost without my conscious thought, as though I willed it to fire. As I rocked back in recoil I cycled the bolt with authority, driving the backup round from the magazine into a full jam. I quickly cleared the jam and slammed the round home. I later found that whatever had caused the jam had driven the bullet back into the case to the point that it was resting on the powder charge and able to be pulled back and forth in the case. But I digress. The freshly reloaded rifle came back to my shoulder as the herd ran up the opposite hill. I couldn't see where my bull was and felt a moment of panic. Then I heard that sound. Not everyone hears it, but it sounded like a guttural bovine sigh of relief to me. Gibbo and I charged down the hill and were quickly joined by the incredibly swift Robert. We found the buffalo quickly, down no more than 20 yards from where I shot him. He was in the last throes, twitching a bit and expired within a minute of our arrival on scene. I didn't even get to, or have to, fire a second shot. There he was. my buffalo. I had always resolved that I would never touch a buffalo horn until it was my buffalo horn. I ran my hands over the knurled boss and deep, thick, hooks of the horns. My shot had impacted perfectly through the shoulder and not exited. As we rolled him into a position for a few quick pics, I checked my pedometer to see how far it said we'd walked. 15 miles. I'm not sure that I've ever walked that far in my life. Then the happy news - we had to walk back to the truck. Off we set at Gibbo 5.6km/h standard walking speed. 3 miles later we were quenching our thirst at the truck and headed for a nearby recovery road that lead within 40 yards of the buffalo's final resting place. Photos were taken before the great beast was loaded whole into the truck for the trek back to camp. When we got back there the kitchen foreman, my mom's adopted favourite, radioed her and the camp manager to tell them of our success, prompting them to abandon their supply run to the Chenji Camp and return to celebrate.
Will I be back there? You be the judge. More story to follow later.
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