Bowsite.com

Today was the day of no bull and the holy cow.

First up, Paul W left us last night to go and meet Lemmi, so he will finally try and land his dream fish, a barra. Haven't heard from him yet but will let you know how it went tomorrow night.

Now back to Paul T, Alan and I. Well we drove and we walked and we drove and we walked and we drove and we walked some more. Today we saw dozens of cows, calves and some young bulls, but no mature bulls were to be seen.

We came upon this old girl with very nice horns with a bit of weight in them. I was tempted to take her and decided at the time that if we come back to that spot and she is there then I would try. But it wasn't to be as we headed to other parts of the property.

Then we did a huge walk up a creek and came across no less than seven different mobs of buff. At one time we saw a lone animal in the creek resting up and we couldn't tell from our angle what his head held. We treated him as a chance for a decent bull and went the whole hog on the stalk. Alan was over my shoulder with the video as we crept above it on the bank. I drew as I came to the edge and then realised it was only a younger bull and let down at less than 10m. He had plenty of years left in him to become a Sherman tank like some of older males we had seen.

When we left that area we came across this young bull and Paul tried some more of his close stalking skills and made like a buff. I took a heap of pics of the sequence and this young bull really didn't have a clue how to react to him. Paul got to 3m from his nose before the bull turned off. Even at that age, Paul was still very wary of him and had tree picked out if decided to go the knuckle and not run.

Here is a few pics of cows, young bulls and calves having a dip in the river. This one of the many mobs we saw today.

A young bull

This is a pic of my set up for this trip. My bow is a G5 Prime Centroid set on 70lbs and 30� draw.it has a Spott Hogg Real Deal sight, Doinker 8 inch Hunter stabiliser, octane 6 arrow quiver, Spott Hogg Whammy rest and wrist sling. At the business end I am using Carbon Express Pile Driver Hunter 450's with 5 inch vanes cut to 30.5�. The heads I am using are VPA two blade 150 grain heads. This are very small heads, but are as tough as nails.  Total arrow weight for is 630 odd grains.

We shot these into Paul's buff and got complete throughs on one through both shoulders and every other shot stuck out the opposite side. Needless to say, I am very confident with this set up for when I get to put one into a bull of my own. Paul even put one of these heads on his curve and got better penetration then the heads he set himself up with for the trip. I will fill you in in the next couple of days when I go through everyone's set up, but Paul is now going to be using his 250 grain VPA two blades after finding a few issues with his original heads.

That is all for tonight. No kills, but plenty of country covered in the search for solid bulls. A lot of dead ground today and although we are running out of time, we have areas narrowed down and will concentrate on those that have produced thus far. Tomorrow Lemmi is coming down and is taking us to another station for the day, so we will see how we go then.

Paul Thompson used a 58lb Black Widow PCR V(5) Recurve. He had Gold Tip Traditional arrows with a brass insert and 315 grain Ashby broadheads, before switching over to 250 grain VPA two blade heads Total arrow weight with the original set up was 850 grains. Paul got enough penetration on a quartering away shot to get to the back of the lungs on his buff, but after testing on ribs with the Ashby's, it was found that the VPA's were much, much better.

Cheers for now and thank you.