Hunting Success



Ben's 350 pound Northern Wisconsin black bear

 Dealing with Ron's passing and the abrupt change in temperature and wind put any fishing on hold for the last couple of weeks.  What's been interesting is the amount of hunting stories my friends have sent me in the last week, each one was impressive.  Because Ben sent this in first, I'll start with him.  Ben is my good friend Kevin Aiona's son.   Knowing him from birth, at the time he was the youngest person ever to set foot in my boat.  I remember when we were fishing the spring walleyes below the dam in Alma Wisconsin, Ben was about 3 years old and I had just gotten my 1985 Lund Pro Angler, complete with an actual functioning live well.  Having caught a number of fish, Ben had to go to the bathroom.  Rather than disrupt the entire trip, we opened the live well cover and continued fishing.  Today I still laugh about it as the Mississippi River wasn't much cleaner!  Ben has turned into quite a fisherman, hunter, and today owns Aiona Heating and Air Conditioning, a well respected company servicing the Eleva area.  I am sure he's finding that owning a business sometimes leaves little time to do those things that you enjoy however he has managed to get away now and then.  Having a bear tag in Wisconsin means work.  With the hunt-able population over an hour north of Eleva, one has to have contacts to help bait your stand as bears are almost impossible to hunt without.  Wisconsin also allows the use of dogs to hunt bear and if you are lucky enough to know someone, it can be quite successful.  Apparently Ben wasn't able to get anything to his bait but did get hooked up with a group that had dogs.  After tracking a nice one, Ben got the opportunity to bag this huge 350 pound black bear.  Every year someone might get one over 400 pounds but the average in Wisconsin for all bear taken is about 180 pounds.  He is having a shoulder mount done and I am excited to see it when he gets it back.  With duck hunting in full swing, archery deer approaching it's peak, you can be assured Ben will be in the field somewhere.


Big Dave's Wyoming 6 x 6 Elk Bull


Next is my good friend Big Dave Pedersen.  Also from Eleva,  he and his wife Mindy own Pac Basic, a packaging company in Eau Claire.  Like Ben, I have known Dave for a long time, his dad was Pastor Pete, who presided over Eleva Lutheran Church.  Dave is another great outdoorsman and is quite the fisherman and hunter.  One of my best Mille Lacs fall trip was with Dave, we left work one weekday afternoon in September and within a couple of hours casting Rattlin Rouges must have caught 15 walleyes including a couple over 28 inches. Dave often travels to Idaho with his friends to archery hunt elk with my uncle Jerry.  This year Big Dave did a fully guided trip into the Wind River area of Wyoming with 5 other guys.  After driving 18 hours the guides loaded up the horses, all 27 of them for the 8 1/2 hour trek 24 miles back into the high country.  There they would set up camp, hunting daily in the surrounding area.  Dave shot this magnificent 6 x 6 bull a couple of days into the hunt, a trophy for sure.  Once it was packed back to camp he spent the rest of the time helping others as well as fishing the mountain streams that were full of large rainbow, cutthroat, and brook trout.  He claims that the fishing was excellent, worth going back just for that.  The total tally was 5 bull elk with the 6th guy passing on a nice one, looking for something bigger.  Dave has the cape and horns in storage, debating whether to do a full shoulder mount or a European style mount.  I think he should do the full mount!  Nice job Big Dave!



Brett's "goat"

 The third trophy comes from my friend Brett Jelkin, who is also an engineer in our Loveland Colorado facility.  Brett loves hunting as well as competitive shooting and probably puts more 10 times more lead through a barrel in a year than most of us do in a lifetime.  An avid deer hunter, Brett hunts both Colorado and in his home state of South Dakota, he also tries to get an elk every chance he gets.  To get a Pronghorn tag in Colorado is a waiting game.  You need to apply, accumulate preference points, hoping that one day you'll be one that is chosen.  This year was Brett's opportunity as it would be only the second tag in 14 years and as he would say......a goat tag for the Pawnee Grasslands, northeast of his home in Windsor, Colorado.  Brett took me prairie dog shooting in that area one year, something I had never done.  My longest kill measured 346 yards with his modified 243 caliber rifle.  It's an interesting place covered with scrub cactus and sagebrush.  Posting on a fence corner near a windmill and water tank it took about 45 minutes for this buck to show up.  Antelope are quite wary and he bagged this one as it was trotting away from him, a 165 yard clean shot.  Brett is probably the best shooter I know and will not take a shot unless he is 100% confident.  Of course it paid off with a nice 14.5" base to tip, 9" inside tip to tip, and 15" at the widest spread, maybe he doesn't think it's huge but I'm impressed!  He has promised me some antelope steaks and I'm going to hold him to it.

The weather is predicting the first real rain we have had since the first of August.  They are saying over an inch, we'll see but we sure need it.  Everything is popcorn dry and I am getting concerned about the amount of soil moisture for the tree's, assuring their survival over the winter.  The garden is hard as a rock and I doubt it would be much fun rototilling it.  My tractor is being fixed and hopefully it will be available before the ground freezes, I'd like to try the disc out on the garden.  The next 2 weekends are full with weddings and celebrations as I have volunteered to take pictures.  Hopefully I can squeeze a trip to Mille Lacs in there somewhere.  The water temperature should be perfect!

Deer 1, Dave 0

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.