Dugga Boy

So, I'll admit it. I'm stubborn. I don't like to change things. I'm also very low tech and old school. I hunt deer using a lever action BLR with iron sights. It's done well for me. I rarely have any shots over 50 yards in the woods where I hunt. I like the quick aim, and I like the look. I also love the .358 Winchester round. But my last three deer seasons have been busts. The first of those years I just never saw any deer close enough to shoot. This past year I had a shot on a pair of does that I decided wasn't safe, and then, on the last day, at last light, I took a downhill shot at a doe and shot right over her back. And yes, iron sights probably did me in that day. But that year in between. That was frustrating. It was the last day. It was getting near sundown. It was still before legal sundown, but the shadows were getting long. I was sitting on a little hill we like to hunt on. There is a bluff in front of us, woods behind us, little hollows to t

The Delta with Mt. Diablo at sunset. Photo By Captndelta - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4519866 I'm a California boy, so people don't believe it when I tell them "yeah: I grew up on the delta." They think of the Mississippi Delta, with it's sloughs and backwaters and thousands of islands, levees, flood gates, bypasses, bass boats, house boats, houses on stilts, and Jazz--but that was Sacramento - San Joaquin River Delta in Northern California of my youth. Seriously: all we were missing were gators and Cajuns. We lived on the American River, which fed into the delta at Sacramento. We were on the parkway, a wide nature preserve between the levees. In my suburban back yard we had coyotes, black-tail deer, turtles, beaver, skunks, rattle snakes, and really good trout, steelhead, and salmon fishing. But more than that: we pulled crawdads out of the river by hand. We fished for catfish at night, using stink-bait and Colema

My trusty, well worn Renegades Teddy Roosevelt and I have a similar opinion when it comes to Whitetail hunting. It's too sedentary. I do it, because it's the only game in New York, but I don't like the sitting. There's just too much sitting around and waiting. There doesn't have to be--I've actually and some success still hunting--and I've had a lot of failures still hunting too--but, for the most part, Whitetails are hunted from stands, so thats how I hunt them. But not always. This one time, I was walking into the woods. My plan was to still hunt up to the ground blind where I was going to post. It was just after sunrise, but it was over cast and a bit misty. It was bow season, in early October. The place where we usually hunt, there's a power-line trail going up hill side, with woods to either side of that. Because there are some houses near by where we enter, we walk into the woods with our rifles unloaded. There is (or was, it's gone

THE WIGWAM CANADA I used to work sporting goods store selling  outdoor footwear (if you want to get a real education in outdoor gear, go to work for one of the big retailers. You get all sorts of training, and also all sorts of pro deals). We sold A LOT of socks. They were our best sellers, and our real moneymakers. We carried several brands, and there were great things to say about each of them. I outfitted a lot of people going north, not just campers and hikers, but hunters and oil-rig workers going into Alberta or Alaska, and the sock most of them wanted was the Wigwam Canada . This is an incredibly old school hiking sock. It's a super-thick Merino wool/poly crew sock with an extra-heavy cushion. The guy who ran our camping division, a veteran hiker from the cut-off jeans and waffle-stomper days, wore Canadas every single day, inside a pair of old hiking boots (don't know what brand--could be Merrells or Wolverine or Vasque --but the old style with a metal s

Wear Some Good Hiking Boots The World Fishing and Outdoor Expo last weekend was a lot of walking and a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed the knife booths. There was a rod and gun club there selling old knives, mostly folders -- Bucks, Brownings, Schrades, Victorinox--in other words, the good stuff. I had to be dragged away from fondling them. There was another knife maker there selling Damascus everything--straight razors, skinning knives, swords. The smith was there, and claimed he hand-forged everything himself. Me, I was in the market for a cheap guthook knife. Now, I know--why get a cheap knife? Well, for two reasons. The first is, on occasion, I'm cheap. I try to save my gear money so I can spend money on experiences. The second, and more important reason, is that the knife it was replacing was also cheap. I'd had a bag stolen from me that had my last cheap guthook knife in it, a promotional knife from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation , which had probably cos

World Fishing and Outdoor Expo The World Fishing and Outdoor Expo is going on this weekend at the Eugene Levy Field House at Rockland Community College in Suffern (and now we know where Eugene went to school), so Yesterday my buddy Big Mike and I braved this: Today's weather is brought to you by Chaos. ...to attend. If you are in Southern New York or Northern New Jersey, GO! It's a nice little show. I's probably 50% fishing, 30% hunting and 20% other stuff. There are great fishing products, boats, kayaks, snow-cat's, rabbits, raptors, outfitters and artisanal root beer. Happiness is a damascus steel straight razor.   Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat with a six pack all day long.  You locked the credit cards in the car, right? RIGHT???  A local petting zoo had brought out several cute and cuddlies, who made a nice contrast to all the stuffed, dead not so cuddly an