New Foundland 2024
I haven't had much time (and really still don't), but thought I'd throw this up here.
I took my brother in law with me to New Foundland this year. He's a new hunter, he went with me last deer season and killed his first animal ever (doe). He enjoyed it and said he wants to get into it more. I invited him to ride with me to New Foundland for my moose hunt, he wasn't ready to spend that much on hunting yet, so he came as a non hunter but got to tag along on every hunt. He also helped drive which was huge, I made this drive solo 5 or 6 years ago and it was brutal.
The rut was kicking off, we saw moose every day, as well as everyone else in camp. Day 3 we took the Argo into some stuff that would have sucked to walk through, let alone drive. We rode about 45 minutes into a remote area that had not been hunted yet that season. We were on a tall (by NF standards) mountain overlooking a large bowl. As soon as we looked into the bowl we saw 5 cows and 1 bull. The bull was a monster in regards to body size. His rack was wide but not a ton of palmation. After a quick glance through the binos, I knew he would be perfectly fine for me even though he wasn't as big as the previous moose I shot there.
The stalk will go down as one of my favorites. When we first saw the bull from our glassing area, he was around a mile away, tucked next to a creek near some small timber patches with his cows around him. Even if we could get down to the base of the bowl, it would be a 300+ yard shot, and the bog between us would have made for a full day of hiking and packing as it was too deep to cross by foot or machine and we would spend a ton of time having to hike trek around it ... Luckily that wasn't the case. We started our walk down the mountain (plenty of cover during the hike down), we grunted the entire way down. I remember thinking on the walk that we're calling way too much, but I also remembered "don't guide the guide". We get to the base of the mountain, we have some open area in front of us with a rise between us and the bog/moose. The plan is to get to the rise, get on the sticks, make a good shot. Instead, we get to the rise, and every cow is within 100 yards looking in our direction, but no bull in sight. Flash forward about 1 minute and we catch movement coming up the rise, next it's a flash of horn. He's walking an angle towards to us about 70 yards out, but going in and out of dips with no clear shot. I'm on the sticks waiting for a shot, he comes up one dip and I have horns in my scope, then the neck, then a shoulder, and within a second of seeing vitals I let one go. He dropped in his tracks, roughly a 35 yard shot. He had come roughly 400 yards across a bog to the calling.
As much fun as the hunt provided, the story I'll probably always remember is the ride home. We got off the ferry to start our ride down the east coast around 7am (25 hour ride). My wife calls and says the hurricane is going to be worse than expected. We keep talking throughout the morning, the creek is rising and not slowing down. Service is getting spotty. Around 11am and our house is surrounded by water and it's over the front and back porch. The last thing I hear from my wife is "water is coming through the back door, I'm grabbing things out of the house and going to the neighbors, I'll call you back". I watched the radar and it was nothing but red and orange over our house for an additional 2 hours, with green 3-4 hours after that, no word from her after that and calls go straight to voicemail. There's zero communication between us until I'm flying down our road, dodging flood debris, at 11am the next day. It was an emotional experience coming down our road, not knowing what to expect, seeing how much damage occurred in our community, seeing cars and parts of homes in the same creek that fronts our house, confident that my wife and kids are fine but not REALLY knowing that they were. Probably one of the best feelings of my life was flying into my neighbors yard (I can cross to our home via their bridge) and running barefoot through a horse pasture to see my kids and wife after ditching my flip flops.
It definitely made for a long 2 weeks between hunting, driving, and cleanup.
Pictures to come.
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Originally Posted by Duckman#1
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