Michael Stenstrom was the last person to sign up for the hunt after some last minute cancellations by others. He and I had arranged to share a hotel room in Austin the night before the hunt, and he arrived there just before midnight because his plane had been delayed in New Jersey. After he woke me up with a telephone call to get me to let him into the room, we stayed up a long time talking. Michael is a good guy, a good hunter, a good shot and even makes very nice knives and turkey box calls. I am sure glad he came along. He was a great addition to a wonderful group of TradGangers.
One day during the middle of the trip John took the hunters in his group to the pasture that was more remote and quite a bit rougher than the other pastures we hunted. I was the last guy to be dropped off at my stand. I liked that spot except that the ladder stand was not secured tightly and would move around and make noise when I shifted my weight to get in a different position. After the feeder went off some deer started arriving. Finally, there were six does wandering around under my stand. Since I had only killed one doe and could shoot another, I decided to take a shot at the largest of the does around the feeder. When that doe was quartering away from me feeding and all the others seemed to be feeding and looking other directions, I started to draw. Immediately the deer jumped and scattered like a bunch of marines who had just had a grenade tossed in their foxhole. The reaction was immediate, and it seemed that the deer I was about to shoot was the one who initiated the panic. I think she saw me drawing in her peripheral vision even though she was bent over eating and facing mostly away from me. I have heard that with their eyes placed largely at the sides of their heads deer can see in a 310 degree arc, just 50 degrees shy of full vision all around their bodies. Perhaps the deer heard some noise I made too, but I have never seen such nervous deer. Those Solana deer are wired with 220 volts, not the usual 110 volts. Needless to say, I never got an arrow off.
Here is another equipment review. As I mentioned earlier, I had Paul Mattson at Badger Arrows build me a couple of dozen arrows for the hunt. Like my new Shrew and my new Sitka Gear clothing, some of my equipment was new and arrived just in time to pack for the hunt. I had never used the new arrows until I arrived at the Solana Ranch. The arrows I got were the wood grained AD Trad Lites and the wood grained AD Hammerhead Trad Lites -- a dozen of each. Each of them was cut to 31" and had 100 grain brass inserts, unibushings, g-nocks, fletching wraps, and 4 x 4" 90 degree left wing feathers. I was using 150 grain points/broadheads. I have found the AD shafts to be very tolerant of differences in draw weight and point mass. The Trad Lite arrows I have shot do well using bows from 45 pounds to 60 pounds or a bit more with 30" to 31" arrows and total insert/point weights of 150 to 400 grains. Obviously, at the extremes of these combinations, arrow flight can become a little ragged, but I am always amazed at how broad the flight envelope really is with the tapered AD shafts. They may not be the best target arrows available, but they sure are good for hunting where you may want to change your setup around to meet the conditions. On this hunt I chose 150 grain points and mainly shot with the Hammerhead Trad Lites. I had never used the HH Lites; however, I have shot the HH "heavies" quite a lot out of my heavier bows, so I had a very good idea how the Lites would shoot. Ted Fry designed the Hammerheads to be very tough, weight forward shafts, and they are both of those things. I have never damaged a Hammerhead by shooting it. I do like the unibushings and g-nocks because they are super tough like the rest of the arrow and the nocks won't come out unless you want them to, but they are easy to remove and replace when you need to. I will go into that more when I talk about the 3 Rivers takedown case I used on this trip. The arrows looked great with the wraps and bright yellow (Trad Lites) or florescent pink (HH Lites) feathers. I used the different colors of feathers so I could tell at a glance which shaft I was using. My new Shrew is 54# at my 29.5" draw, and the arrows were flying very well. When I shot my doe I got a complete pass through and found my blood-soaked arrow lying on the ground on the far side of the deer. Penetration on the buck was good for where I hit him at 28 yards slant distance, but it was going to take a lot higher poundage in bow weight and a lot more mass in arrow weight to get a complete pass through when the deer was hit full broadside in the heaviest, thickest part of the rear ham. The arrows definitely met every expectation I could have had for them. As it turned out, I did not use the Trad Lites on this hunt, but I have used the same shafts extensively in the past and believe they are among the best hunting shafts available. I am now convinced after trying the Hammerhead Lites for the first time that they are even better than the Trad Lites for most purposes. On my Hammerhead "heavies" I had Paul Mattson install aluminum collars behind the brass inserts. That makes the arrows even tougher and more resistant to damage, but it also makes them harder to pull out of targets. I thought the Trad Lites and HH Lites I got for this trip would do fine without the collars, and that was correct. I do have some collars that I could install by pulling the inserts and reinstalling them with the collars behind them, but I probably won't. Because the HH Lites do not cost much more than the Trad Lites, I will favor buying the HH Lites in the future.
I only have one significant problem with the arrows I have received from Paul. They are beautiful and well constructed in every way except for the somewhat annoying problem of some of the inserts coming loose. I had that happen on some of the HH Trad Heavies I bought to take to Africa with me and ended up pulling all the points and re-gluing them using 24 hour marine epoxy. With the current batch of arrows I had a couple of brass inserts and one unibushing come out. I was able to re-glue the unibushing and one of the inserts, but the other insert and a screwed in field tip pulled out when I was pulling the arrow from the target we were all shooting at in camp. That did not make me happy, but I was then even less happy when Gary Sorenson shot one of his arrows into the target and hit my insert/point. To my embarrassment, the insert/point of his arrow was driven backwards into the shaft, splitting it like an old musket that gets fired with mud plugging up the end of the barrel. Chris Surtees was kind enough to provide me with a new brass insert and the glue to put it and another insert back into my shafts permanently. I don't know if it is the glue Paul has been using, or the amount of the glue, or contamination in the shaft, or some other cause, but the bonding of the inserts in the shafts is the only improvement I could suggest to Paul that would make the arrows he has built for me just about perfect. Once the inserts that were loose were re-glued, the arrows looked great and performed flawlessly. I just wish that buck had not run off with my new arrow in his rear!
I still have some more hunting stories and some stories about how stupid I was to take along a whole bunch of new equipment without having tested it before on other outings. I got lucky this time, but things could have gone bad if my untested equipment had not performed as expected. One thing I wish I had brought is a much brighter headlamp. The headlamp I brought was not bright enough to illuminate hogs sufficiently to shoot them after dark. I should have bought one at Cabela's when I went there before the hunt with Terry Green and Gregg Dudley. Oh well, next year I will know.
Allan
Topic: Solana 2010 (Read 15093 times)
