No shots fired but it was well worth the trip in my opinion, the planning beforehand and seeing it unfold and become reality was highly rewarding.

This thing called hunting has a firm grip on me now, a grip my mind knows well, my passion for fishing and the sea has been in that grip for the last 30 odd years, i have the “bug”, im hooked!!

Being relatively new to bush hunting the biggest obstacle in the areas ive hunted for me so far has been the bush and the terrain, its so steep and so dense  that it would almost be impossible to access it without having a machete and some absailing gear, knowing where you were at any one time in heavy bush cover without the aid of a gps, if its working and the use of a compass which is only gona give you direction unless your pacing out your steps that got me thinking how do some of these larger animals make there way through the bush and why would they want to tackle that sorta terrain, the reality is and lit up like a light bulb for me, they dont!! lol

I know some of you more experienced hunters by now are probably laughing, this is the basics but ive sorta had to work all this out myself.

The focus for me on this trip suddenly became looking for what an animal on the ground has to have in order to survive in that environment and whittling them down to just a few essential needs.

Sun,water, food is what i started with and it had to be located away from human contact.

Google earth had the answer for the first 2, identifying clearings from space and overlaying topo maps allowed me to look at easy access “terrain” to them, marking routes and downloading them to gps and weather  the clearings “sun” had the means to support animals around them eg water, food!

The food was a hard one, nether of those two tools could answer that so i just took a punt, its a forest for gods sake, its gota have food!

Just for those that dont know these topo maps actually mark alot of these clearings, there surrounded by a dark green ring with the middle of it shaded in light green.

MAP PIC.

Two clearings were picked quite close to each other which were both off the main doc track, both clearings were close to a kilometer off the main track.

My missus and traveled south late friday night and  arrived at pureora forest via kokomiko rd at around 1am saturday morning.

We sleeped in the back of the car in the doc campsite there which is located at the end of kokomiko rd, the campsite is HUGE and i reckon it would be great to have a forum hunt trip here one weekend, theres 3 doc shelters which are very basic shelters but the guys that were there had them well setup wif tarps running off the front of them and tents around them, the shelters had woodfire bqq’s inside them and bbq table outside them, great for a piss up lol every man there had a quad bike wif them, you can pretty much drive em round the whole forest by the look of it.

CAMP PICS.

6.00 am we were up and and walken it up the rd, we bumped into a hunter who was on his way back down and he had shot a young stag the night before but was on the skinny side, 

lots of pig sign on the way up to the main track which had clearly been made in the early hours of the morning as it was fresh, 5 kilometers later we reached the first clearing.

DECENT1 CLEARING PIC.

This first clearing “decent 1” was a great looking spot, it was obvious this was a local animal hang out, there were scrape marks and foot prints everywhere,  the scrape marks were difficult to tell how old they were but they were in a mossy grass which once its turned over drys very quick, within a few hours from what ive seen if its got sun on it.

Fresh crap sign and old sign were both present.

CRAP SIGN PIC AND SCRAPES

old sign

new sign

SCRAPES

PRINTS

we spent an hour in here, which was as long as the missus could handle it, hidden in the bush with the wind sorta in our favor and a good view of the clearing and had two game trails covered leading in, you could smell where the stags had been.

I’ll be heading back here again and spending a day in this spot or close to it for a morning and afternoon hunt.

Nothing made itself knowen and we decided to head to the next clearing.

WALKING OUT PIC

TRACK1 CLEARING PIC

no sign in here what so ever but access was easier here and thats why i suspect there was no sign, good place for a bush camp site base!

It was time for us to head back but i felt like i had learnt so much in that one trip, knowing that id been close to these *****.

HEADING HOME

 

Would have loved to see a couple of clearings like that today .Looks like nice country Tug and the animals are obviously there .May have to look at a weekend in there soon 

Spent many days/weeks in Pureora in the 1970's/80's/90's. Used to walk up the Waihaha track off the main road to Waihaha hut. Approx 3 hours of mostly easy travelling from memory. Finish work in Aucks at 5:00pm on Friday and be in the hut by ~midnight. Great access from there to 3 different types of hunting areas that all produced well for pigs and deer if Doc hadn't done another 1080 drop in the previous year or two. It has been a favourite 1080 dump for DOC for years unfortunately. Before that started we used to regularly get/see quite decent heads (by Nth Island Red standards) out of there. You may have seen the hunting movies by the Graf brothers. We used to regularly bump into Egon Graf (the father) with the young lads in tow around Waihaha during the roar. He was a really interesting guy to talk to with massive experience in the bush. He rated the heads out of Pureora as the best available in the Nth Island at that time. We also used to access into the Maramataha river via a road that has since disappeared. There are some great flats near the old bush train track routes that run through that area, although I suspect it might be pretty overgrown by now as we only ever saw one other hunter in the area. He was an old fella that used to wrap himself in newspapers and tunnel into the bracken to sleep. Pretty tough old bird, but you have to see the bracken in there to believe how big and thick bracken can actually get. There used to be a ponga log bivvy in there that would sleep 3, but there was no track so every trip in was an 'adventure' until we finally found our home for the next few days. The final 3 wire bridge over the Maramataha on the way out was also fun with a few hind legs hanging off your pack. Was also bulk goats in that area. The nearby deer farms were a curse in the roar as you couldn't always tell whether you were stalking an animal in the farm or one outside the fence until you actually got close. Really nice area to hunt, but I don't know how you would access it today now that the old clay road we used has gone.

bloody interesting read dave ill be looking that stuff up, you'll probally be hearing from me via pm for a little more detail

Hey Tugs,

Yer i Spent 6 months at Tihoi tramping etc in this bush, titirapangi, purerua and wekaroa, alsome bush and man we saw plenty of stags and pigs, up at the bog we called it pigs were every where,

Awesome report tugaboat...Very good read