Collin Cottrell

While we hunted turkeys in Florida with David Mills at Williams Wildlife Preserve and Team SRR we were also able to make a few new friends in hunting camp. Personally this is one of my favorite parts about being on the road turkey hunting in different places.

One of the the guys we met in Florida was Randall Bailey, who also shot a nice osceola gobbler and a big gator with David Mills. I received an email from Randall a few days ago updating me on his turkey season so far, here is what it said:

We left Atlanta on a Wednesday morning, arrived in San Antonio, Texas and drove to San Angelo. This is some prime deer and turkey hunting country, but the weather has been very hot which has lead to an extended drought.

We hunted Wednesday night with no luck but on Thursday morning that changed. At about 8:00 AM the birds made there way into our setup and I was able to shoot one with my crossbow at 15 yards. The bird jumped straight up and went right down! At about 9:30 AM we had another bird come in from behind us very silent. I managed to turn and shoot this one also! What a morning! Later that afternoon I went back out and managed to shoot 2 wild hogs with the crossbow also. It was quite a day.

Thanks for suggesting the Grim Reaper Broadheads to me for this trip. They worked great, just like you said they would. The Grim Reaper is a bad broadhead!

That night at dinner we noticed a smokey horizon, soon followed by the glow shown in the attached photo. Within an hour, the rancher arrived and advised us to evacuate immediately as the wind was predicted to shift, which it ultimately did.

The state of Texas is definitely under stress right now from all these fires. An estimate this morning said up to 1000 square miles had burned. This was all a bit scary, but we managed to get out with room to spare.