The Drought of 2011

These are the boat ramps in Rockwall off of 66, they are usually pretty busy, but not today.We got a little bit of rain last night, but Lake Ray Hubbard is 5.5 ft low and it will take a lot of rain to bring it back up to normal pool. You can pretty much walk around the whole lake along the newly created mud beach. My friend has found all kinds of things in the mud, things are showing up that have been covered for 30 years

Moving the Tower part 2

This will be the second year that we have been off the lease and when I first found out that we were off it was a really sad thing. I was sad for the loss and I was sad that Morgan was not going to get to enjoy it anymore. I had watched him grow from a little boy who would chatter up a storm while we played tic-tac-toe in the blind to a young man who was telling me to be quiet. He had shot several deer, I had already decided that he could do all the shooting, give him some fond memories to carry with him, and his last buck was a nice one. And I had planned on letting him do all the driving around the lease. Yes , it is very sad, but life goes on and so must I.

We had left our tripods, a feeder and the tower down there as I was hoping to get on a lease in Coleman Co. with my friend Robert but he had to get off of his lease. Charlie and Morgan and I went down to Lampasas Labor day weekend and picked up our things. I had borrowed a 16' flatbed trailer to load everything on. Taking the tower apart was not as bad as one might think but it did take us 3 hours and there was some rust we had to deal with. After it was dismantled and loaded into the trailer we picked up the tripods and the feeder.

 We left there around 1:30pm and stopped at the Dutchman's place, which is just north of Hamilton, and got a Ruben. We then drove to Whitesboro,  which is about 20 miles west of Sherman to a little place we got on, it is in Grayson County and is a bow hunting only, because Grayson is a bow hunting only county. It was a long drive 535 miles, we left Rockwall at 4:45 am Saturday, picked up Charlie and left his house at 5:30 got to Lampasas around 9:00 am.  and made it to Grayson around 6:30. We set up 2 tripods and put the other one out but did not set it up because we ran out of daylight.

We are planning to go back up to Sherman this Sunday and put out 2 feeders and another tripod that is at Charlie's house.

Moving the Tower part 1

I set the tower up in 1993, the second year that I got on the lease to hunt. I kind of married into the lease, by that I mean that my father-in-law was on it for 20 years before I got on it. When I got on it there was Buddy Vass, Micky Vass (son to Buddy) and my father-in-law, I took my f-i-l's spot. There were 3 paying guns, your immediate family could hunt any time and after Thanksgiving we could bring guests down, which I did. In fact this is how I met Charlie, my sister worked for a guy who had never been deer hunting and asked if I would take him, that was in the 94-95 season, I think that introducing anybody to the sport is a good thing. We have since remained friends for 16 years or so.  There was a total of three lease's involved and Buddy got his whole family down there with him. After a time the big lease got sold and the lease to the east went up and that's when they started scurrying around like rats. Several folks had to get off and Charlie was one of them, then the next year I was told that they wanted to make it a family lease as their was just room for 3 hunters, Henry, Micky and Dart (Buddy's wife) Buddy had died the previous year.

Now I think there was some smelly stuff going on. I had kept my mouth shut about a lot of things that were not right, because I loved to hunt down there.  The place where my stand was located was on top of a hill at the nw corner of the property and behind me (west) were ceder thickets, (on another next lease), this was the bedding area, to the south was a little funnel in the trees where the deer would move through to the ceders in the am, and the tin barn,(a little storage shed that was  Buddy's blind) and beyond was the road and my f-i-l's old blind.



187 acs inside the blue.



 

Dart's 8 pt.

There was 187 acre's where we hunted, we always saw deer and we always killed a few. This was the only place where Morgan had ever hunted up until last year, and he was really spoiled, but he will learn and get used to hunting different places and hunting out of ladder blinds, pop up's, tripods and climbers. I am really glad he got a chance to see all the deer and shoot the deer that he did.