The wild hogs turned and walked down the sand road in my direction.
In the mornings we ate breakfast at the Perkins Restaurant & Bakery across the street from our motel in Bartow, Florida. Personally, my take on Perkins is that their dinner and lunch fare is palatable (as in acceptable) but a little lacking compared to the highly pleasing pies, cakes, muffins and other baked goods from their baking ovens.
However, their breakfast offerings are both tasty and varied, so after ordering a couple of bland meals I opted for breakfast regardless of the time of day. My favorite was the corn-beef-hash with poached eggs and hashed browns. Plus at least one slice of their “real deal” pie (a different selection every meal).
Perkins Restaurant also made an adequate meeting place when our knowledgeable and congenial host Richard Meachum and his crew of Under The Son Outfitters came to introduce us to the hunt as well as join us for a meal or pick someone up.
On the second day of my hunt we took an ATM down a 2-track road that stopped at a sandy woods road, this was the area I was hunting this afternoon. A pop up ground blind was set up for me to hunt in. An ocean of palmettos with scattered scrub trees and low brush surrounded the blind. I settled in and waited.
An hour later I noticed several wild hogs moving through the palmettoes toward the road in front of me. They walked into view about 45 yards from the blind and began greedily gobbling up some mixture of stuff that wild hogs obviously liked.
Forty-five yards was further than I was willing to shoot. My deer lease has wild hogs and I won’t take that long a shot there and I certainly wasn’t doing it here either. Gradually the hogs worked their way closer. I put the rangefinder crosshairs on them and watched the distance shrink a little.
A unidentified noise in the woods sounded and whatever it was spooked the hogs and they ran back into the palmettos. Twenty minutes later they returned.
Three of the hogs were mature and the rest were younger. When I ranged them at 20 yards I was good to go. However, the smaller young hogs were in front of the larger three and I did not have a shot. So I waited for an opportunity.
But they weren’t going to give it to me. Unexpectedly they went back into the palmettos and kept going. There was still hunting time left and I waited to see what would happen. An hour later a group of 5 hogs walked out of the brush to the right of the ground blind. They went to where the other hogs had been and sniffed around. Apparently the hog mix had been eaten because the hogs turned and walked down the sand road in my direction.
The lead hog turned into the brush on the left side of the road. A mature hog was following it and I drew and shot it in the vitals. All the hogs ran into the brush and I heard crashing sounds.
This Writers Camp was organized by Wade Nolan of Whitetail University. At the company end we have people from Atsko, Field & Stream Stores and Swhacker Broadheads. The outdoor writers are Joe Byers, Josh Honeycutt, Tim Dehn of Arrow Trade magazine and the founder of the website Bowhunting.net, Robert Hoague. We are bowhunting wild hogs with Richard Meachum of Under The Son Outfitters
