Well the Minnesota Deer Hunting season ended on Sunday with the result......no venison in the freezer. The last few years my success while deer hunting has been better than the state average of around 40% of hunters filling their tag. Bagging a deer has it's plus and minuses. On plus side there is nothing better than fresh venison tenderloin chops, fried in butter, with onions and garlic, it doesn't get any better. The minus side it quite frankly it's a lot of work! Field dressing, dragging out of the woods, hauling it home and hanging it in the pole barn is only the beginning. The fun really starts when the butchering begins as I am one of those guys that are leery of dropping it off to have it processed. Besides being to cheap to pay someone to do what I am pretty good at, if it isn't too cold out and one can convince a neighbor to help me it isn't too bad of a job. Oh well, maybe next year. One of the things I would really like to do is harvest a trophy deer, something I could hang on the wall. Having deer hunted for 40 years now I can only remember once when I saw a respectable rack on a deer and then I could not get a good shot off. Being a responsible hunter means you don't take the chance to wound an animal if you can help it. Oh well, other than that time the largest buck I ever shot was a small 6 point buck (3 x 3 for you western hunters) with about a 10 inch spread, nothing to write home about, that's for sure. On the other hand I have friends that seem to have experienced a number of trophy bucks in their lives. My Uncle Jerry is one of them as I have a couple mule deer rack mounts of his earlier years hunting out west. They are impressive to say the least. Leon Lambert, my good friend from Pueblo, Colorado is another guy that seems to have no shortage of large buck mounts, a Boone and Crockett elk mount, and a number of trophy pronghorn mounts. His house looks like a museum of natural history! Another is my good friend and fishing partner Lory Brasel. He hunts near his home town of New York Mills, MN on his step father's land. Although it is a small piece of property, it is a natural funnel for deer coming out of the river bottoms into the fields above. Here he is pictured with a beautiful 10 pointer (6 on one side and 4 on the other), a nice addition to the 2 he already has hanging on the wall. It's ironic that the biggest deer I have ever seen in the wild was about 15 years ago. Back then I would often fish the fall trolling bite on Mille Lacs till midnight or 1:00 in the morning. One night arriving home around 2:00AM I turned on my big halogen lights in the back of my house only to see a huge 10 point buck with an even larger 12 pointer right behind it. Oh well.
I shoot a Remington Model 6, 30-06 pump action rifle. My first deer hunting rifle was a sporterized 30-06 military gun with a simple 4X scope, it must have weighed at least 10 pounds. I bought it from my boss at the time for a whooping $75. Although extremely accurate, it was a bear to carry around and I needed to look for something more practical. Lee's Taxidermy in Prescott Wisconsin was probably the best place at that time to buy a gun, something I soon found out. Having only $350, I was determined to get a simple Remington 760 pump, a sling with hardware, some shells and a case. The owner suggested I get the Model 6 instead, it was a fancier, nicer gun with a Monti Carlo stock, special checkering, and a unique cartridge end mounted in the receiver. Stating I didn't have enough money for the gun but he must have either felt sorry for me or really wanted to get rid of that gun. The price was $340 for the rifle, $15 for the sling, $10 for the mounting hardware, $365 + another $17 for tax. Having only $350, he told me to take the gun and pay me later if I could. As I left a pretty happy new gun owner he yelled out "Hey, you better sight that gun in" and handed me a box of shells to boot. I ended up buying a scope from my good friend, the late Pat Holmes. His company was the rep for the company that made all of the 1 inch aluminum scope tubes for Burris. He got a super deal and I was in business. 4 years ago I was sighting my gun in and the first shot was 6 inches high, 4 to the left. After adjusting and shooting another round it was now 6 inches low and 4 inches to the right! I adjusted it back to where it was and the third and fourth shot was a bulls eye. The next year a deer came by my stand, one that Jack had hit in the leg. It took me 6 rounds to finally I finally put the deer down. Knowing something was amiss and because the scope had a lifetime warranty I sent it back to Burris. A couple weeks later they called stating the springs were weak causing the scope to be off, they could not fix it, the model was obsolete, and they would offer me 75% off any scope in their lineup. Because most of my shots are under 50 yards I took their 1.5x - 6x model, quite a bargain at
$200. After carefully mounting the scope I bought some Federal Premium 165 grain Sierra Boat Tail bullets to sight it in. Man, I had trouble as they were all over the target. 10 years earlier a worker at our plant loaded me a bunch of shells that were dead one, 2 inch patterns. Talking to my in house gun expert Brett Jelkin, he believed that the factory loads were not ideal and he would load me up some shells to try. He set the bullets a little further out so there wasn't as much "jump" when the bullet hits the beginning of the barrel and did it ever make a difference. My first 3 rounds yielded a group at 1 1/2 inches, pretty impressive. Brett does an excellent job as his shooting knowledge is second to none. He even sent me this ballistics chart with the solid bold line being my loads while the dotted lower line is a standard factory load. Although I was definitely ready, I never did get a chance to put it too the real test. The good news is that everything will be ready to go next year.
This morning it was 10 degrees and the small potholes and swamps were froze over. My guess is the surface temperature on Mille Lacs has to be in the high 30's. Hard water can't be far behind. My friend Keith is back from his summer in Alaska and I am determined to meet up with him a couple of times out on the ice. In the meantime my neighbors boy, Ryan Przymus stopped by with a couple beautiful pictures of a 17.5 and a 15.5 inch crappies he got in Nonyhoa Lake. When I asked him where that was he said.........Non yhoa business! He promised he'd take me there and I am looking forward to it. He also promised to send pictures however I am still waiting and will post them when they show up. Those were impressive to say the least.
Amongst other things like putting the boats away and settled for their long sleep and breaking out the ice fishing gear is the development of the fruits of our labor, slowly fermenting in Lory Brasel's basement. Lory decided to get into making wine this year and together we bought some equipment to perfect this age old craft. With an abundance of fruit this season, there was no shortage of varieties to make. Here is a nice and colorful picture of our wines sitting in carboys, finishing off their fermentation. From left to right they include raspberry, pear, wild grape, plum, and chokecherry. The raspberries, pear, and wild grapes come from my property and the plum and chokecherry is from Lory's. Not shown is 5 gallons of apple wine that we pressed a few months ago. This picture was taken about 6 weeks ago, you can see the foam on the top of the wild grape wine as it continues to ferment. Lory has since re-racked the wine into smaller carboys and will be ready to bottle next week. These wines tend to be very dry and will require us to sample each one to determine just the right amount of sweetener if needed, a tough job but someone has to do it. The picture does little justice as the wine is very colorful ranging from a deep Cabernet color to a rose to a pleasant chardonnay hue. Obvious these wines are not as sophisticated as one would buy in a store but it's like anything you do yourself, it always has that special aura about it and I can't wait to open our first bottle.
