catclaw

It was just a rant. prolly no photos

I think they play Oregon st which was ranked 24 this week but lost to an unranked BYU team so they won't be in the top 25 anymore. OSU does look like they have potential and Locker was a pre-season Heisman talk. The OSU game is at home so that bodes well for them.Other than that, Boise doesn't look to have any tough games- they should win them all and run the score a little to get their ranking up- they are already 3 so it will be hard to go much higher.

The 15x56 SLCs are only able to accommodate down to about a 62-63 mm IP distance. If you have eyes set closer than this, they will be tough to use. The Geovids are a little wider yet. The Kaibabs will easily work down to 60mm. This is the biggest drawback of the roof prism binocular. 56mm Objective lens makes it tough to get them close enough for all eyes to use them. There are two hunters on my street that cannot use my 15s. I have to pull the lens cover straps apart to make them overlap or I can't even use them. Might be the reason some prefer the Minox- maybe they will squeeze closer together. I really find it hard to believe that someone would prefer them otherwise. Ergos are not as big a deal on big glass as it is mounted on a tripod, the view is pretty much everything. I wish that they had quit putting research into the porro prism designs and we still had a choice out there. Remember when the 15x60 Zeiss used to be the Gold Standard? Well the really good ones are still porro prism style: Kowa Highlander, Doctor 30s etc.

I have been trying, elk hunting keeps getting in the way though...

I have a half dozen of the Covert Is and there is still plenty of room to lag bolt them on. The new ones have 3/4-1" of dead space (my lag bolts are only 1/16" thick at head). There is also a dead space around the camera on the Covert IIs. The Covert IIs that have given me problems have all been purchased this summer. I have only had to send one back so far though. It lasted one session and died. I bought some more of the Covert Is this summer too but haven't had a chance to check the night photos to see if they are the same quality or not. The main thing I like about the Coverts is the size. Now that Stealth and Tasco have come out with small cameras, they will hopefully have to step up to the plate, so to speak, and make sure their quality is good.

Wow- that really sucks.

Twice I have checked cameras and found that the dates had started over on 1-1-10 when I set them even though I had carefully set the date and time up. I always turn them off and then plug the remote back in to check my settings. It's just a little frustrating but the night photos are real blurry. I was going to switch back to the older style but sounds like that is not a fix. I also don't like all the wasted space in the metal boxes for the new ones, they are considerably bigger. Tasco now has a mini camera as does stealth. I am going to try both of them and see what I think.

Those tags were really good the first couple of years but not so good anymore. Better tag for locals that can keep tabs on them and jump on it when they are there.

That is a very interesting buck. Good job!

The guides are the ones mostly getting their cameras jacked, I think most of us are pretty good about just leaving stuff alone. Wow, not sure that stereotype is really even valid. Must have had a guide help someone kill a buck he saw once and that it was his or something?? Funny rant though!! And I guess i can't wear shorts anymore when I am scouting... bummer, cause it has been pretty hot this summer in the hills. I did notice a nice drop in night time temps the past week so it is getting bearable.

You could always go to the zoo and get some jaguar scat, that seems to work pretty good.

I found a big bull with cows last Friday. I saw a half dozen bulls the past two weeks that are tending cows. I filmed some small bulls sparring a couple of days ago. The rut is looking good this year and is way early! The rifle hunters are going to be picking through broken stuff I am afraid. The bulls were very responsive to calls. I could lay on my cot, hit a cow call and 3 bulls would sound off. Once you get them going, they keep feeding off each other. The archery hunt should be a ball-the opposite of last year!

Camo is meaningless on a rifle hunt. You can get by with just subdued clothing colors. As for camo on a rifle, I can't see the reason to ever do it except for some varmint calling. I have a camo shotgun for calling because it was a turkey model and came that way. Just make sure your rifle isn't "shiny" and you will be fine. Your bare face is going to be the biggest give away to an animal, not your rifle. As for camo patterns for closer stuff, most of them are too dark for typical AZ hunting. I like lighter patterns like Nat gear, Hidden Mesa and a few others. I don't lose much sleep over it for sure. I really like the original Treebark pattern but it is no more.

I think they will get a berth if they win out again this year- I can see Boise/Bama for the nat championship! I mean Boise is returning most of their starters- they should be awesome. I am a die-hard Devils fan, but I don't think Erickson is getting the job done. I see them finishing with about an even win-loss record. Oregon will be the team to beat this year but I don't see them ranked in the top 10 at the end of the season.

Glad it worked out for you. The only unknown is the durability. Good luck

We had a set at the get together last year in Flagstaff. They are quite good, not quite as good as Leica/Swarovski but a big step up from Nikon Monarch and Vortex Vipers. Not sure how well they will hold up- I think Red Rabbit has a set.

He also has been in on the killing of more big game animals than any dozen hunters on this forum. Bill Quimby Wow- you speak so matter of factly about this!

I had a 100" buck come in yesterday morning and it had rained 24 hours earlier. Three bucks came in within a 4 hour period. This tank was a little sandier than some of the others and there wasn't much activity on them. I think they like to get a drink in areas where they are used to it. Organ Pipe NM is not typical of much of the WT habitat- especially in Central and Eastern AZ. Just because they CAN go without. doesn't mean they won't. It sure seems to curtail their visits though. I think they just drink in seeps and pothole that are in more concealed locations when they can.

The author sure is humble!

My buddy ran into one last week in 22S. He said it was crazy!

Sometimes I think about the same thing, you put so much into it and then you just get crapped on by others. I haven't given up yet, but I sure have been tempted.

Naw- they probably did a trade with AZ G&F for elk or something and the bears got dropped off in unit 27 with all the other problem bears!!

I'll tell you exactly how, I have watched cowboys ( and I use that term loosely) with insulated saddlebags and they are stocked full of beer. I once followed a trail on San Carlos that went deep into nowhere. There were stacks of empty beer cans at every gate. The last gate I came to was over 5 miles from the nearest access! I guess some guys like their beer in the woods! One time I was hiking into Reevis ranch from the Apache lake side trailhead. I got about 2 miles up the trail and the guy in front of me pulls out a huge water bong and lights up! Somehow his bong rolled off a bluff- not that I had anything to do with it I don't think he could have fit anything else in his pack that sucker was so big! Another time I was hiking out of Fossul Springs when I passed these 4 guys packing in a huge ice chest full of BOTTLED beer! It never ends I guess! I think the judges need to sentence these jokers that shoot stuff up and little the woods to a hundred hours of forest cleanup or a couple of tons of litter cleanup. That would make them think twice about doing it again.

Lark, I never said you were a liar, you simply don't understand internal ballistics. I guess there is no point beating this anymore because you know what they say about teaching old dogs new tricks... I'll bet you have never playing with a Oehler Mod 43 ballistics lab, I have. It has a strain-gauge feature where you can actual measure the pressure your favorite loads are making. I have incrementally seated bullets in and out, measured pressure and velocity to see correlations etc. You are simply misinformed if you believe that seating a bullet out creates higher pressure; it doesn't. An easy test is to find a load that is near max pressure with your rifle and using a fairly heavy bullet(lets use a 200 grain bullet in your 300 mag for example) seated close to the max COL for your magazine box. Then seat the bullet about 1/4" deeper and watch your bolt lift and every other pressure indicator spike! In this example, we will take a 200 grain Nosler Partition and seat it so that you have the COL of 3.340, the SAAMI max for this cartridge. In this load, the bullet is seated .614" into the case. If we load it with 77.25 grains of H4831SC (I picked this powder at random as a likely candidate for this load) we will get (according to Quickload) 62,321 PSI. This is right at the top of SAAMI pressure for the 300 Winny. If we then seat the bullet .250" deeper and leave everything else alone. The pressure will rise to 71,849 PSI. This is a 9528 PSI INCREASE in pressure. A 15.2% increase and enough pressure to flatten the primer, cause brass to flow in the head and surely make for hard bolt lift. The primer pocket will probably be toast etc. This info jives with what was posted by Eric Stecker of Berger bullets. I don't know if you have Quickload software (souds like not) but you can easily run any scenario you can imagine and see how pressure changes. The pressure spike created by jamming into the lands wont be as great as the spike caused by seating the bullet .250 deeper and displacing an additional .305 cubic centimeters of case capacity as you do with seating the bullet 1/4". Sorry we don't see eye-to-eye on this but it sounds like maybe I have more experience, education and knowledge in the theory and practice of internal ballistics than you do. I would never tell you how to operate a power plant as I am sure you know far more about that than me. I won't post on this subject again. It is like mud wrestling with a pig, you can't win and the pig likes the mud.

You can't lie about the sex of a bear anymore because of the mandatory check-ins. You can, however, lie about where it was killed. I know when the harvest objective first went into affect, many hunters would declare that they killed their bear in unit 27 since it had so many females in the harvest objective. A bear hunting guide who wants to continue hunting could have encouraged his hunter or called it in for him and lied about the unit or sex back then. They can still lie about the unit. I am not sure what the ramifications are if you get caught lying about what unit you killed a bear in so long as you killed it in an open unit. Probably have something they can do to you. The twist where they wanted the unit to close caught me off guard. It is my belief- but I could be wrong- that the G&F dept is very much against anyone scouting from an aircraft and they have crafted laws as carefully as possible to make this all but impossible to do. There are SO many big game seasons now scattered throughout most of the year that you can't hardly find two days that you can legally scout from an aircraft. In one sense, I can't blame the guys for getting creative and trying to get the season closed. I know that this particular guide said that he was shoot a sow if he saw one just for this reason of reaching the harvest objective. I think the only real solution to it is the revamp the flying laws to make them a little less restrictive. I hate it when political agendas get in the way of hunting. Just like we will see baiting end next season. The dept has the proverbial hard-on against baiting, because of that, no matter how vocal we are in opposing it, a baiting ban is all but a done deal. They didn't like the outcry they had last year so it is quiet this year. The smart pilots never get convicted of the flying during a season, it is the average joes that get hammered. George Taulman flew all the time during the late elk hunts in AZ and beat his rap in court every time. Let me get off my soap box