The Fishing and Hunting Thread

This guy gave me a run for my money this morning, 150 pound striped marlin, about 1 hour fight released alive to fight again.

 

Not sure why that last pic was so huge.

Cabo was pretty good, got to fish for 4 days, 16 marlin, 2 wahoo, 2 dorado and a broomtail and gulf grouper. We fished pretty hard for marlin during the day then we would go back out in the panga and look for grouper.

 

Got my turkey after three days of hunting.

Spoiler

I saw one or two hens together sporadically after hunting for a few hours on Thursday evening and then all day on Friday but no toms in sight, and no gobbles. After not seeing any deer while hunting there last November, I had three whitetails pass by within 50 yards of me just minutes after I knelt down along the field I'd eventually kill my bird in. The weather was shitty and I was a little frustrated after seeing so few birds. The winter kill was very harsh and I ended up finding a big turkey wing with feathers in a snowbank.

On Saturday morning a friend joined me and I had him sit at a blind I made overlooking a drainage between two pastures that the turkeys frequently passed by. I was sitting along a fenceline across the property, facing a pasture. We got settled in at about 5:30 am and at 6:20 he was texting me, asking if they'd still die if they ran away after you shot them. I thought he was bullshitting me as usual but he actually had seven hens show up where I expected them to and had a tom following them, strutting away. He shot twice and the birds escaped back into the woods. I didn't hear him shoot because it was so windy, and had been calling a little more aggressively than the past two days.

Around 6:40 I had to piss really bad (drank way too much coffee while driving there) so I got up and went about 10 feet away from where I was sitting underneath a pine tree, out in the open next to the fence, and immediately after I zipped up I saw a hen turkey fly out of the trail opening about 50 yards to the left of me. I knelt down and grabbed my gun next to me, and about 10 seconds after the hen flew out lo and behold there was a jake slowly walking out towards the field. I couldn't go back to the tree so I froze in place. He saw my decoy about 25 yards from me but started walking slightly away so I very gently clucked a few times on the call. He immediately turned towards the decoy and over maybe a minute walked right up to it while I raised the shotgun to my shoulder very slowly. About 10 feet from it he stopped and puffed his feathers out, then started strutting. My heart was beating out of my chest by this point. I let him strut for a few seconds as I settled the bead on his neck and once I pulled the trigger he flopped onto his back and was stone dead. I was practically numb and didn't feel the shotgun kick. Everything went like clockwork except for me having to take a leak and having that bird strut for the decoy was exhilarating. He was bigger than expected and I got some very nice breasts, thigh, and legs in the freezer now.

 

Awesome I'm glad you had better luck than we did!

 

Great job on the turkey. It's my turn this weekend.

Whereabouts were you hunting?

 

Thanks! I was just south of Cloquet. There was still snow in the woods that went well above my knees. Good luck this weekend!

To answer a rep, I didn't gut and pluck the bird. Rather I just took out the breasts and legs/thighs, which was the vast majority of the meat on it anyways. No stink, no mess, and it took only 15 minutes. The main reason is a lack of freezer space for the whole carcass, but dressing it that way went surprisingly well.

 

Nice work on the bird, fuckers are crafty.

What species of turkey is that, we have merriams but the colors on that one are a little different than the ones we have.

 

We have the Eastern Wild Turkey here. Northern Minnesota is along the edge of their common range.

Crafty fuckers indeed... I realized pretty quickly that any thoughts of stalking one down was just wishful thinking on my part.

 

You can stalk them, but you have to think ahead and ambush them. Sit on their path from the roost to the field in the mornings and evenings. Spot and ambush during the day. I've never done it, but one of my teammates used to guide for an outfitter in Kansas and he's knocked down hundreds of gobblers in his career. He's coming with me this year and he said that was going to be part of how we hunt.

In that respect, it's a lot like deer hunting. Deer and turkeys are very active during the day but a vast majority of hunters choose to leave the blind from 11:00-3:00 and pass up some great opportunities.

 

Nettdata they're the same subspecies. I live in the middle of Minneapolis and there's a flock of turkeys that roosts in the neighborhood. They are not shy at all- several times last year morning traffic would be held up by a tom strutting through an intersection and he would just look annoyed when someone got out of their car to chase it. The turkeys I hunted this were very skittish. Much more so than the deer that were around.

lhprop1 you raise a good point, it was the "think ahead" part I wasn't so good at... or just didn't do at all. It was very difficult to be sneaky in the woods with deep crunchy snowbanks everywhere. I do exactly that when I'm deer hunting, sitting for dawn/dusk hours and stalking in the daytime. A few years ago I saw a massive 10-point buck that was shot just after lunchtime as it walked out into an open field and it really changed the way I thought about daytime deer.

 

My brother in law called me last night and said he would be at my house at 4am because the stripers were going off at Lake Pleasant which is about 40 minutes from downtown Phoenix. We got there when it was still dark and waited until 5:15 to launch and then took a 70 mph ride across the lake. We fished for about 2 hours and managed 23 fish, they were all eating 3 inch clear/sparkle swimbait. There were some bigger fish mixed in that were pulling drag.

 

I got to hear one of the coolest things I think I'll ever hear this weekend.

We were turkey hunting this weekend. We set up our blinds in the afternoon and tried to get the turkeys before they went to roost. They flew in a from a different direction, but we had 5 toms roosting just 50 yards in front of us.

Just at sundown, we heard what can only be described as a blood-curdling scream come from about 50 yards behind us, immediately followed by an entire back of coyotes howling and yelping. It was one of the most haunting sounds I've ever heard.

The yotes would howl, the deer could scream, and all of the turkeys would gobble in response. It was a hell of a racket that echoed through the woods in full stereo and we were right in the middle of it.

I could live 100 more years and I'd probably never get to witness that ever again.

 

That would be a rush, I've never experienced something like that. Do you have any idea what caused the deer to scream in the first place?

I went out kayaking on a small lake in Minneapolis on Saturday and caught a few little bass. It was fun to get back out on the water and paddle around in nice weather, and catch some fish with bucktail spinners I'd tied last year.

Yesterday I went mushroom hunting with my dad and the morels are just starting to come up around here. We found a handful of tiny gray ones, but I think they taste better when they're harder to find anyways.

 

If I was getting mauled by a pack of yotes, I'd probably scream, too.

 

Now I gotcha. Did you see any evidence of it the next day?

 

No, but we didn't really look. There's a 10ish acre field of tall grass where I suspect the deer was killed, so it would have been tough to see anything unless we stepped on it.

 

Crazy. What was a little confusing about your story was no lead-up to the attack, like it must have been bedded down and they snuck up on it or something. Were the turkeys gobbling when they were on the ground?

Today marks the first day of the year that I go fishing over my lunch hour. Nice to have something to look forward to, some peaceful time watching a bobber on a lake in the middle of my work today.

 

I have no idea what led to the deer getting whacked. We were 30-40 yards into the woods facing away from the commotion. The turkeys were all flying into their roosts about 75 yards in front of us. The yote/deer encounter happened out in the tall grass 50-100 yards behind us.

We didn't see anything, just heard it.