December 2008 Newsletter

Hello,

It's that time of year again. Nearing the end of another hunting season.

I actually decided to combine 2 different newsletters all into one... Our Hunting newsletter, and we will be adding a 2009 "spring fishing special''. So I welcome you to read on.

Topic 1) Spring 2009 Blow out Specials. We are all looking for a good deal now days.

Check this out. For those who usually just skim the personal items about L & M newsletters, I'll fast forward straight to the specials in case that's what your most interested in. Interested in a $850.00 Fly In Fishing trip? As many of you know, 2008 spring was a late ice out season. Last year was the first year in about a decade that we needed to cancel out some groups due to ice still being on the lakes for our spring season opener. A couple of years in between came close, but we were always able to get into the lakes in time to produce the earily season fishing trips. About a decade ago, what happened, many of the May fishing groups decided to push back the trips to June to avoid the chance of being iced out. We are seeing the same result this year and trends with the bookings, most people are nervous to go in May and wanting to back it up till June. A decade ago, it took us many years to talk many of you into going again in May. With the current economic times we don't have years to wait for the trend to work back into normal mode. We are prepared to spice the deal for those who are not booked in yet and want to give May a try. May certainly can produce some awesome fishing. Certain restrictions, dates, and rules will apply. $850.00 per person. Inquire for further details if interested. Note: If for some freak reason, 2 years in a row late ice happens, we would roll your trip/deal into another trip this same year. Put this thought under your pillow tonight and sleep on it. We feel that L & M is one of the best out there and for this rate, for you, the consumer, it's a win win deal compared to our competition for what your getting. Some people say May is too cold to fish. Non-scence. We beg to differ.

Topic 2) For those who are L & M guests, you know we are avid hunters and love to hunt during our off season. 2008 fall season was no exception. The exception however, we cut back even further on the amount we spend towards hunting due to economic times, yet still getting to hunt a lot. You can say, more bang for our buck. It's amazing how easy it is to save money when it comes to everything from hunting to fishing, to life in general. Theres ways to save everywhere if a person is willing to look. We did lots of hunting near our house in Montana, getting to learn Montana even better this year.

Montana Hunting 2008.

The 2008 hunting season started off with a bang. Most of you already know that Larry drew a hard tag to ever draw in a life time, let alone draw a hunting area that is just plain awesome. Saying it in a good way, this was a bad tag to draw only in terms of not hunting bighorns before. Since the area was so good, we wouldn't have any prior experience in hunting bighorns as how to judge them, etc. We felt we are good enough hunters and have all the right gear, we didn't need a guide. So after a couple of months of planning this hunt and checking out the area, late in Sept, we jumped in the truck with our gear and off we headed towards the sheep area. The plan was to go up for 5 days, give or take, and get a feel for the area. More or less a scouting trip as we would come back 2 or 3 different weeks to complete the hunt after we have scouted the area. The season was already open, so we could harvest an animal if we saw fit to do so. First afternoon we rolled in, we found a glassing point. Wasn't 5 minutes of glassing, we located our first sheep, a few miles away, over many canyons. But it was a sheep and had a ram. Good way to start out. We did this for the next few days. What we did, was just found as many high points in the area and spent many hours glassing with our optics, overlooking many sheep. We found many sheep including a total of 12 rams. The 13th ram we found, Larry had a decision to make. We found a sheep that would make just about any person happy, yet we didn't want to end the hunt so soon. The ram was located in a spot that we could access around the cliffs surrounding the area We made a stalk to within 150 yards of this bedded ram. Where we sat on the ridge looking at this ram sleep, deciding if we should shoot or not. It took 45 minutes to decide. The hardest thing to decide was, do we want to end the sheep hunt. It wasn't the fact if the sheep was big enough, as it was a GREAT sheep. Larry made the comment after the shot, my heart never pounded so hard when getting ready to shoot. Larry's 257 Weatherby, with 100 grain Barnes Triple shocks, did it's job. Then the work began, finding a path below the cliffs to where the ram is laying. While later, pictures where being taken and the work began by loading our back packs with meat, horns, and cape. When all the work was done, we found ourselves a nice little place to camp for the night. The weather was great, it was late, we figured we would just leave the area bright and earily the next morning to start our way back home. A GREAT HUNT!

Shortly, later in October, we did a little antelope hunting about a 10 minute drive from our house. There is a nice little ranch of about 8 sections of land that usually hold a few antelope. It gets a lot of hunting pressure, which means, usually we have to walk off the ranch road to find them as most people who hunt the ranch, just road hunt. That's exactly what we had to do. We did a couple of walks into different areas that have no road that we know antelope tend to hang. First spot, sure enough, we found a small group of them with a nice buck down in a flat, all bedded down. We snuck around the ridges above them getting into shooting postion. I took a 300 yard shot. That ended my antelope hunt. After the antelope was taken care of, we walked again into another area thinking should hold a few. No luck on that walk. Next day, Larry was able to find his antelope in a totally different area of the ranch. It took a while to locate them, but the group we found had about 40 total and we took a few hours working our way close enough to get the shot.

We have been going to SW Montana the last 4 years to this one area to hunt elk. The end of October and into November, we went around the same area again. This is normally a fun hunt. Lots of work, but still fun. This year was a more physical hunt than normal years. It started out with no snow and the elk were not in the area near our camp. We had to venture out to find a new area that had fresher sign of elk using the area. That took a few days to figure out. We finally found a herd of elk mid day on about day 4. We worked in on these elk from one angle only to find out that wasn't going to work and had to back off before being detected. Backed way off, swung way around to get the wind back into our favor. This way worked out. After about 3 hours of playing cat and mouse in the trees with these elk trying to sort out all the cows from the bull, we finally got the right angle for a shot on a bull passing through. I took the shot and it turned out to be a nice bull. Wasn't a real hard shot, just had to shot through a lane in the trees that was a couple of feet wide. Otherwise 150 yards wasn't too bad with my 7mm Mag. By the time we had the elk quartered, it was pitch dark. We were about 3 miles from camp, so out came the flash lights and the walk begun. If you are elk hunters, you know walking in the dark isn't anything new when elk hunting. This night proved to be different, no moon night. I had plenty of extra batteries, however, the bulb burned out of my only flashlight that I had with me. That made for an interesting walk, to say the least, to get back to camp I learned a very valuable lesson that night. Always carry an extra flashlight. The next day we got weathered out. Weather turned for the worse and wasn't even worth heading out. Made for a LONG & boring day in the tent. Foggy, rainy, snowy, couldn't see 50 feet most of the day. When the weather broke the following morning we headed up the mountain before day light. About 1/2 way up to where we wanted to be by first light, there was maybe 3 to 4 inches of fresh new powder snow. We heard a "mew". We stopped in our tracks and knew elk were ahead of us. It's still way before shooting light, but with the clear skies we had a little twiglight from the stars to work with. We were able to see ahead that the black blobs ahead of us where elk. We slowly worked towards a patch a trees to our immediate left and worked an angle through the tree's so when first light arrived we were in position to make a shot. We had the wind in our favor so we knew we would be OK. A bit later as we got more light, we saw 2 bulls. Larry was able to sqeeze off a shot right at first shooting light. It was right about 300 yards. The bull ran over the rise and we sat there wondering, not knowing how hard the bull was hit. So we just sat in the trees for a few minutes to let it get brighter out. Soon after, we walked up to where the elk went over the ridge and found the bull dead just over the rise we saw him cross. We worked on getting the elk quartered. As soon as we were completed, more clouds where rolling back in. We had both our elk tags filled, so doesn't matter to us how the weather is now. That whole day we got pounded by another 12 inches of snow.

After we got out of the mountains and back to our house, Mary's cousin, Lee from Alaska, came to visit us in Montana for a while. We went out a few days looking for birds around our house, both pheasant and sharptails. You could say, we are not very good bird hunters, or better yet, not very good shots at birds. We saw plenty, but either jumped too far ahead to get shots or we just plain missed. Never have been good with shotguns, that I will admit.

The last couple of days while Lee was around, we got permission to hunt deer on a near by ranch. We tried to use this time to get Mary her deer. Many deer where found and a lot of OK bucks. Nothing we wanted her to shoot though. The middle of the day on the last day Lee would be around, Shane spotted a good buck, bedded up top of a ridge line in the trees, best deer we've seen for her to get a chance at. We made a stalk plan and worked into position. Low and behold, things didn't go as planned. In the heat of battle, we found the buck, but I didn't see it before he saw me. What happened that we later figured out, while we where getting into position, the buck got up and moved to change his position. The buck took off running over the edge so we took off to cut them off. We did just that, but to our surprise there were more deer now all mixed in together. Maybe 9 or 10 total with bucks and does scattering out. 3 bucks lined up the far ridge. I already had the shooting sticks out, so we got Mary sat up and ready to shoot. I was sitting to the left of Mary and Larry to the right side of her. I saw the big buck. He was the bottom one , I said pointing ahead. Larry said, the 2nd one down. As Larry was saying that he ranged it out at 347 yards. Mary shot. She listened to me too well. She shot the bottom buck, however, the angle I had and compared to the angle she could see, she shot a different buck. I didn't see the true bottom buck and Mary did, as my view was partially blocked. Anyway, this marks out the 3rd straight year for Mary in her hunting streak. 3 straight years only shooting 1 shot and killing one deer with each one of those shots. The big one got away, it was his lucky day. She still got a nice buck though. Still a fun hunt and Lee enjoyed being able to be a part of the day.

Now Larry and Shane have their Montana deer tags to work on. We spent a lot of days looking around different ranches, looking over many, many deer. Walked many miles, glassed many hours. We passed up many deer in hopes of finding Mr Big. We've seen a couple of these Mr Big's but never had a chance at one due to them not being on property we had permission to hunt on. One of these bucks was "this" close. Wasn't more than 100 feet, but..... on the wrong side of a fence line. We sit up with the wind in our favor waiting him out for over 3 hours. He had a doe with him and at one point we thought they would cross over. But as luck would go, he never did and to the best of our knowledge, will live to see next year. Some of the deer we did "pass" on, we said we would probably regret not taking one of them. As they were big, but not "record book" big. o we passed on a few like that. We'll regret this one down the road we thought. We both ended up getting nice deer. Nothing overly special but very nice representation for the area near the end of the season. Larry shot his on the same ranch Mary shot hers. Shane shot his on a ranch that we've hunted before a couple of years ago that typically holds some nice bucks.

With the big game hunting season over, this will bring us back to our normal day to day life styles. Back to business and I'm sure we'll find days here and there to squeeze in a prairie dog shoot or go coyote hunting around the house here in Montana. I get asked this question many times, so I thought I would answer it for those who don't ask us and still wonder. How much do these hunts cost? There are variables to get the actual cost. If you would look hunting outfitters, yes they are very expensive because its fully outfitted/guided. They provide knowledge of the area, accommodations, food, transportation, etc. Those outfitted hunts provide many luxuries, in our case are not needed for our style of hunting. Our basic costs involve just the gas, food, and maps of the area. We have all the equipment in order to hunt on our own with out the assistance of an outfitter. As a bonus, we have a freezer full of prime meat from our hunts we eat on all year saving us on grocery bills. And in all of this, we are doing what we love to do.

We hope you all enjoyed our hunting stories from this past year. We would love to swap stories with you next time we see you all.

Again, we hope you all stay in touch with us throughout the winter. We would love to hear about some of your travels or adventures.

Lm@Lmflyin.com
Larry, Mary and Shane

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