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