A friend of mine was kind enough to let me bowhunt his place for the upcoming turkey season and remainder of deer season, so i put up a couple cams to take inventory of what was in the area. Upon the first card pull, i had what i thought was a pretty good sized hog, i underestimated his size.....big time! Having had a great deer season that left the freezer full of venison i decided to put my efforts towards this hog. I put the cams back out and did some more scouting of the area and found a big wallow, ab 4'x3', and an absolute scorched earth type of trail. I came back out and hung a stand about 30yds off that trail and laid down some corn where i had pictures of him cruising thru so he would have a reason to stop long enough to put a good shot on him. Well last night i was finally able to get out there for the first time and give it a try. I got up in the stand around 7pm as the trail cam research showed that he was cruising the area between 930-11pm. All was quiet, minus a raccoon that hung out at the corn pile all night, until about 9pm when i first heard him crashing through the palmettos. I heard him coming from a couple hundred yards away thrashing, stomping, and snorting the whole way. Anyone who has ever heard hogs coming thru the woods can tell you it is a pretty unsettling sound, this hog sounded like 300lbs of pissed off coming thru the woods haha. He finally gets to where the kill light can pick him up and he starts feeding as i click on my red headlight so i can see my pins. I check the camera make sure he is in frame, draw...settle the top of my pin's silhouette just behind the elbow's silhouette, as he steps forward, revealing the vitals, i squeezed off a clean shot and watched as my lighted nock hit home and bounce through the woods revealing his death trail! He took off crashing thru the Florida brush and within seconds there was one final crash and a drawn out groan of defeat. I got down and pulled the trail cam card, which got the entire shot sequence, confirmed a perfect heart shot...and the track job was on! We found blood immediately at the site of impact, and from there the crimson river exploded and revealed itself from 20yds away, the Rage Hypodermic had opened him up perfectly! We found him a mere 30yds later, layed under some palmettos, my biggest hog to date, roughly 300lbs of Florida swamp monster had fallen to my arrow. No pass thru on this hoss, but the Rage Hypodermic did a phenomenal job and penetrated both sides of the rib cage and was stopped by the offside "shield." A perfect center punch of the ol ticker and when we found the arrow, the head was in perfect shape! No bent blades, dings, or burs in the blades, very impressive after battling the tough hide of these critters. enough is enough...here's some pictures. Enjoy! and as always a video will be posted soon!
Do you eat them? A couple guys at work are from Mississippi and hunt them hard with dogs. They said the meat is no good though other then small ones. Was wondering if they were wrong or not.
yeah he is definitely walking that line and they are right for the most part. What i am planning on doing is letting the meat age for about a week and a half which should help with the taste some and then i have a buddy who is a certified Chef that is going to try some things with it. This summer while im waiting for the season to roll back around i will be filming some wild game cooking "shows" to give everyone different ideas for how to prep wild game outside of the ordinary styles, so keep an eye close to my Facebook and YouTube pages for those!
hope it works out for you... our upper limit here in GA is about 200# anything bigger then that get rolled in a bury pit or used for yote bait unless someone wants to keep the head for a mount then that is removed first..
Very Cool. That's for sure a big boar. I've got a hog sniper light for my bow but I've yet to hunt'm at night. Is the video up? Your youtube page wasn't opening for me.
I will be finishing up the video today, so hopefuly itll be up later this evening. Was the link not working? If not let me know so i can try and fix that.
