Keys fishing boat reels in 683-pound swordfish – Florida Keys – MiamiHerald.com

KeysNet.com

Another mammoth daytime swordfish — 683 pounds — has been caught off the Florida Keys.

Fishing on the Mystique, a 61-foot Viking owned by Katherine MacMillan, Marathon captain Billy Rabito Jr. presided over the catch of the broadbill hooked some 30 miles to the south of Marathon Tuesday afternoon. The fish bit a whole 5-pound bonito hooked to 80-pound braid, spooled on an electric Shimano Tiagra reel. Mike Driskell, the boat’s mate who lives on Little Torch Key, manned the reel.

It was weighed on a scale, recently certified by the International Game Fish Association and the state of Florida, according to Byron Goss, co-owner of Big Time Bait & Tackle in Marathon, who witnessed the weigh-in at Key Colony Beach Marina.

About 150 spectators who gathered for the weigh-in were treated to complimentary fresh swordfish steaks, Rabito said.

Rabito said it took about two hours to bring the big broadbill to the boat and additional time to get the fish onboard through the boat’s large transom tuna door with the aid of an anchor windlass. Everyone on the boat, including MacMillan, helped to get the swordfish into the cockpit.  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Keys fishing boat reels in 683-pound swordfish – Florida Keys – MiamiHerald.com.

Turkey hunt numbers see big jump | The Tennessean

By Mike Organ

The harvest for opening weekend of the spring turkey-hunting season in Tennessee was significantly larger than last year.

The spring season opened last Saturday, and by the end of the day Sunday a total of 8,367 birds were killed, according to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

That was 1,170 more than in 2011.

The Midstate continues to have the most bountiful harvest, with four of the top five counties: Maury (271), Greene (212), Dickson (206), Sumner (201) and Henry (198).  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Turkey hunt numbers see big jump | The Tennessean | tennessean.com.

Another permit will not help save the endangered oryx- statesman.com

By Mike Leggett

Sometimes it’s funny when animal activists put on bunny suits and hop around courthouse steps to get themselves on television.

I admit that.

And it’s funny that there’s always a camera around when they need one. Fast and foolish. My Twitter can outrun your fact every time. That’s the way of our world.

But this new rule on scimitar-horned oryx, for which the group Friends of Animals takes credit, is just wrong, and it’s going to cost lots of the animals their lives. At least their lives as they knew them.

It already has.

If somehow you’ve missed it, FOA sued the government to stop hunting of oryx, which are on the endangered species list in their native African desert habitat. In the wild, they are officially extinct.

Except in Texas. Here they survive on private ranches where private citizens pay to keep them and maintain their numbers.

The issue is that some of these ranches permit limited hunting of these animals for a fee. These fees, which can be quite steep, provide some money to offset the cost of maintaining herds.

FOA says that’s not acceptable. In an Austin American-Statesman story, Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, was quoted: “If an animal is an endangered species … they shouldn’t be tormented and killed in the interest of some trophy tourism industry. That is unjust. That is not what the Endangered Species Act allows.”  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Another permit will not help save the endangered oryx.

KY Afield Outdoors: Perfect Timing For Turkey Season

A gobbler struts his stuff, hoping to impress the hen - one of the splendors of the spring season. / Paul Brown/Special to The Clarion-Ledger

FRANKFORT, Ky. – Kentucky’s spring wild turkey season has been so successful the past 15 years in part because of the timing of opening day.

“I think we’ve accomplished our goal of having a productive season in a relatively short time frame,” said Steven Dobey, wild turkey program coordinator for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “We’ve hit that window between the onset of breeding and nesting.”

Kentucky’s statewide spring turkey season opens every year on the Saturday closest to April 15 and lasts for 23 days. This year, the season dates are April 14 through May 6, 2012.

The turkey hatch peaks in late May or June, weeks after hunting has concluded.

“Our flock is stable, with a population estimate of about 250,000 birds,” said Dobey. “Geographically, Kentucky is in a great location. We have relatively mild winters, a long growing season and a fairly dry early summer, all of which benefit turkeys.”

The harvest of turkeys during the spring season has grown steadily in the past 15 years, from 13,606 in 1996 to 32,191 in 2011.

“Our stocking efforts have paid off and in the early years we had a conservative harvest strategy that’s really paying dividends now,” said Dobey. “Statewide, our turkey population is in excellent shape.”

Kentucky Fish and Wildlife released 6,760 wild turkeys on 430 sites across the state from 1978 through 1997. Restoration was completed in 1997, when Kentucky’s wild turkey population had increased to around 130,000 birds.

Hunters bagged over 30,000 turkeys for two consecutive years for the first time starting in 2010, when there was a record harvest of 36,097 birds.

Dobey said he believes last year’s spring harvest of 32,191 would have been higher, possibly setting a new record, if the weather had cooperated. “About 58 percent of the harvest occurs during the two-day youth-only season and the first week of our statewide season,” said Dobey.

Weather is the one factor that biologists can’t control. “We keep our fingers crossed every year. If it’s sunny on opening weekend, we’ll have a higher harvest,” said Dobey. “Last season we had heavy rains across most of the state, and the opening weekend harvest dropped 27.1 percent from the previous year.”

This season hunters are likely to encounter fewer juvenile gobblers while afield. The weather had an adverse impact on last year’s reproduction.

The statewide brood survey for 2011 showed a 42 percent decline in the number of hens observed with at least one poult (young turkey). Statewide, the average number of poults per hen dropped to roughly one and a half.

“Western and central Kentucky appear to have had a little better reproductive success than the rest of the state,” said Dobey. “The birds that nested the earliest were significantly impacted by the heavy rains and flooding.”

Hunters could see fewer older gobblers, too, this coming season. The good news, however, is there will be lots of two-year-old birds which do most of the gobbling.

Kentucky’s turkey flock is arguably the best in the region.

Based on the number of birds taken per square mile, Kentucky has a higher harvest than six of the seven adjoining states — Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Missouri and Illinois. “We’re on par with Tennessee,” said Dobey, “but our season is half as long as Tennessee’s, and our bag limit is half theirs.”

Dobey said Kentucky has about 90,000 turkey hunters.

Of the successful hunters, about 25 percent take the season limit of two birds in the spring. Most of the birds harvested are adults. “Last season 16.7 percent of the birds taken were juveniles (jakes),” said Dobey. “With the impressive statewide flock in Kentucky hunters are able to be selective, and key on older birds.”

Bass get schooled–how to stay a step ahead of the fish | al.com

Captain Mike Carter shows a chunky Guntersville bass caught on a wobbling combo of swimjig and swimbait. He says offering something different is often key to success.

By Frank Sargeant, The Huntsville Times

To Captain Mike Carter, consistently catching Guntersville’s hard-pressured bass amounts to one basic concept.

“You have to stay one step ahead of the bass because they get schooled,” Carter told me as he cranked in yet another 3-pound North Sauty chunk. We were fishing an emerging hydrilla bed in 3 to 6 feet of water, a pretty standard pre-spawn pattern on Guntersville, but Carter was throwing a lure that most other anglers rarely use these days, a Luck-E-Strike Scrounger wobbling jig head equipped with a 5-inch Zoom Fluke tail.

“I’ve seen a lot of lures come and go here on the lake,” says Carter, who has fished Guntersville for more than 40 years. “Something gets red hot and everybody catches fish on it for a few months or a few years, and then the bass get conditioned to it and they won’t bite it very often any more.”

He said that even the notorious Alabama Rig, now with more than a dozen imitators and hundreds of thousands sold, is showing signs of having worn out its welcome.  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Bass get schooled–how to stay a step ahead of the fish | al.com.

Tarpon jig fishing coming under fire | TBO.com

Anglers swarm over the tarpon of Boca Grande Pass from April through mid-June, when up to 25,000 are thought to inhabit the inlet at the mouth of Charlotte Harbor.

By FRANK SARGEANT | The Tampa Tribune

OK, if I had a gig where I could make $1000 a day for 60 days straight, I would be doing that instead of writing – you bet I would, for those 60 days.

And that’s the lure to dozens of guides who flock to Boca Grande Pass in late spring each year – the amazing concentration of maybe 25,000 giant tarpon in a pass where the fish are jammed shoulder to shoulder. Clients can almost bet on catching the fish of a lifetime, allowing these anglers to make two trips daily and stack up money they’ll need badly through much of the winter, when getting even one daily trip can be a challenge.

And, a whole lot of my close friends are involved in this fishery, guys who have helped me build my career and who still help me out each year with the Outdoors Expo and lots more.

But it’s starting to appear that maybe we ought to take another look at the way we are dealing with that fishery – at least when it comes to weigh-in tournaments as attached to jig fishing.

Many of the old-time guides there, the live-bait folks, some of whom are third generation Boca Grande guides, now charge that weigh-in tournaments, of which the Professional Tarpon Tournament Series (PTTS) is the largest, are killing fish, particularly the big females on which this fishery depends.

To be sure, the old school has a potential ulterior motive. Make the dozens of out-of-town boats go away and their fishery and the money that goes with it returns to them, the gentry of the island, as it had been for a hundred years prior to the introduction of jig fishing in the 1990s.  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Tarpon jig fishing coming under fire | TBO.com.

Turkeys not observing their normal mating patterns this year | Outdoors | Macon.com

By EMORY JOSEY — bobcat6440@windstream.net

My trail cameras generally tell me the same story about the breeding habits of the wild turkey.

Usually, the gobblers get interested in the ladies around the end of January, especially if the weather is a bit warm. They are seen strutting among the hens during the month of February.

Neither the hens nor the gobblers seem to know that breeding just one time is sufficient to fertilize all the eggs the old girl will lay for the next four months. Or perhaps they do know — and just ignore the facts. The real fact is that the gobblers breed the hens many times before her biological clock finally tells her that she should begin laying eggs. She will lay the first egg, skip a day, and then lay an additional egg each day until the nest contains from 11 to 13 eggs.

She still goes to the gobbler each morning and continues to breed, slipping away from him before high noon to deposit an egg in her secret nest. Even then, after the laying mission, she returns to the gobbler to spend the rest of the day with him for — you guessed it — more breeding.

This continues until sometime in April, depending on the age of the hen. It is only after the nest is full that she fails to return to His Majesty. At this point, she has no use for him because she incubates the eggs approximately 20 hours a day until they hatch.  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Turkeys not observing their normal mating patterns this year | Outdoors | Macon.com.

Application Period for Tennessee’s Fourth Elk Hunt to be Held April 1-May 31, 2012

NASHVILLE — The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency will accept applications from April 1 through May 31, 2012 for participation in Tennessee’s fourth managed elk hunt. (Persons can begin applying after 8 a.m. (CDT) on Sunday, April 1).

Essence of hunting and TV garbage | The Jamestown Sun

By Bernie Kuntz The Jamestown Sun

His name was Jack O’Connor, a native of Arizona who received a M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri and in the 1930s and taught journalism at the University of Arizona. He began writing for Outdoor Life magazine in that same decade, and was paid $200 a month.

O’Connor became shooting editor of that magazine in 1939 and held that post until his retirement in 1972. He is still adored by those who have read his writings, including this humble columnist. Here is an excerpt from a wonderful piece he wrote following a hunt in 1946 for Stone sheep in the Prophet River country of northern British Columbia entitled, “A Day in Ram Heaven,”

“…we came out on top the world, in a land of rolling arctic sheep pastures — soft and spongy underneath, clad in a thick, damp carpet of mosses, lichens, grasses. These pastures were really a series of hilltops that formed a shoulder of a great mountain. They were cut by deep canyons, black with shale, formidable with cliffs; and behind them rose a mighty series of crags black as ink, crisscrossed with the glittering white of everlasting ice that clung to their crevices.

“All around us were other upland pastures, tinted in yellow, rose, and umber by the frosts. We looked down on great black canyons, purple timber, and the blue Prophet River meandering through yellow muskeg meadows and dark forest. The great mountain peaks across the river were powdered white with snow, and on their lower slopes patches of golden aspens glowed bright like candles in the night.

“We saw sheep almost the instant we put the glasses on the grassy slopes that were still above us…”

That is the sort of marvelous writing that O’Connor exemplified, but nowadays the focus is on outdoor TV shows on the Outdoor Channel and the Sportsman’s Channel. And 90 percent of them are dreadful!  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Essence of hunting and TV garbage | The Jamestown Sun | Jamestown, North Dakota.

Ted Nugent praises Lawrence’s ‘Hunger Games’ hunting form- USA Today

By Bryan Alexander

Jennifer Lawrence had been praised from all corners for her Hunger Games performance — even rocker/bowhunting enthusiast Ted Nugent has chimed in.

Nugent, a member of the Bowhunters Hall of Fame, loves how realistically Lawrence carries herself as bow-wielding Katniss Everdeen in the movie.Apparently Lawrence hit the bullseye with the performance.

“All of us archers and bowhunters are so very happy to see real honest-to-God archery form being displayed properly for a change,” Nugent tells USA TODAY. “Proper archery is one of life’s most beautiful ballets, especially when executed by a beautiful woman like Jennifer.”  Click Link Below For Full Story!

via Ted Nugent praises Lawrence’s ‘Hunger Games’ hunting form-USA Today

« Previous Page — Next Page »