Innehållsförteckning för April 2017 från Outdoor Life

HOPKINS VALLEY, NZ / 8:08 a.m. “We were headed up a mountain valley on New Zealand’s South Island to hunt tahr and chamois. The traditional way to access the heads of these valleys is to drive right up the riverbed, but it had rained the night before. When we tried to navigate a boggy spot, our 4-wheel-drive foundered and we had to shove it back to firm ground. Finally, the river went down a bit and we pushed on to our campsite.” —Andrew McKean (Read more from the hunt on p. 43) WAYPOINT…

Modern turkey tactics aren’t so modern. When OL began publishing in 1898, the practice of using calls to sweettalk toms was already well established. In fact, turkey hunting in the early 1900s sounds all too familiar: The turkey hunter who has pet theories evolved from his latest successful hunt will generally find, on his next trip, that turkeys have changed their nature and no longer elect to do as he thinksall good turkeys should do, but rather…leave him wondering why plans that worked so well yesterday are such miserable failures today. —Tom Turpin, November 1916 Turpin’s (no known relation to Dick Turpin, p. 8) advice to “learn to imitate the call of the turkey, and when to call and when not to call”—still rings true. The experimental detours of desperate…

SPINNING EDITOR’S CHOICE ABU GARCIA REVO ROCKET score: 92.7 price: $200 Fishermen who prefer spinning gear have been hamstrung with sluggish reels since the advent of the contraptions. All that may have just changed. The Revo Rocket is a thirsty spinner. Its outrageous 7:1 retrieve rate slurps up a shocking 40 inches of line per turn, thanks to Abu’s proprietary computer-optimized gear design (COG). Built on a carbon body, the Rocket features a rigid insert that stiffens the frame, ensuring precise gear alignment while remaining ridiculously light; our test model weighed 7.7 ounces. We worked large expanses of water quickly with jerkbaits and found the Rocket to be equally up to the task of probing deep-water structure with finesse baits, or yanking fish out of vegetation. It’s a winner, but…

You know how you tense up when you hear leaves crunching toward your stand, thinking, Is that a deer approaching? Now imagine what a buck thinks when he hears 180 pounds of bipedal hominid in size 12 boots stomping through the woods. You will never know how many animals you spook because you simply won’t see them. In this age of treestands and ground blinds, hunters seem to have forgotten the art of moving “on little cat feet,” to quote Carl Sandberg’s famous poem about fog. In a woodsman’s dictionary, the word “hunting” is synonymous with stealth. Real hunters stalk, sneak, slip, and ghost through the timber. Anything but stomp, snap, crackle, and crunch. Because noise matters above almost all else in the woods. Here’s how to limit yours.…

TIP NO. 27 TREAT A GUNSHOT WOUND Focus on controlling blood loss. If a limb is hit, apply direct pressure or a tourniquet between the wound and the heart. Use the tourniquet if you’re treating yourself. Apply direct pressure to a torso wound. Use homeostatic clott ing dressings if available. —C.A. TIP NO. 29 IMPROVISE A TOURNIQUET Use one when direct pressure isn’t working or a wound is squirting blood. 1. Wrap a rope or belt as high up as possible on the limb. 2. Insert a stick as a windlass. 3. Twist hard enough to stop blood flow and eliminate the pulse on the limb—it will be painful. 4. Secure the windlass, write down the time, and seek medical help. Only remove a tourniquet if rescue is days away.…

MAKE IT YOURSELF IT MAY SEEM COUNTERINTUITIVE for legendary call sellers Will Primos and Preston Pittman to give advice and encouragement to do-ityourself call makers, but they remember when they were starting out, making their own calls using what they had on hand, experimenting with ways to make sounds to lure turkeys and other game into range. The first turkey call for Pittman, founder of Pittman’s Game Calls (pittmangamecalls.com), was the bottom of a broken quart beer bottle he had found along the banks of Mississippi’s Black Creek. The glass had been smoothed and mellowed by having lain in the sand for who knows how long, water washing over it, scouring it, and inadvertently improving the sound it produced when Pittman took it home and scratched out yelps with a…

TIP All might not be lost if you spook a bird you’ve called in. Wait an hour, change calls and setup locations, and try again. Cluck and yelp soft ly and sparingly on the second att empt. SOMETIME IN THE hazy days that marked the beginning of the modern turkey boom, aggressive hunters had a forehead- slap moment. Walking and calling, it seemed, provided the perfect alternative to the old-timer’s tedious habit of sitting against a tree and yelping once per hour. Moreover, this exciting, interactive technique proved deadly for locating and killing turkeys. Those young hunting innovators even coined a cool term to describe their method: “cutting and running.” Before long, video pioneers and their enthusiastic followers were stretching their legs, yelping long and loud, and posing for picture…

1 THINK BIG Upsizing your lures can increase your odds of connecting with some of the largest bluegills in any fishery. During the pre-spawn period, when large male ’gills first move onto the flats to stake out their future spawning grounds, soft-plastic swimbaits will provoke strikes from territorial bulls. Favorite lures in this category include Storm’s Suspending WildEye Swim Shad. At 3 inches, these baits are outside the experience of most panfish anglers, but they are just large enough to cause a reaction from bulls. At . ounce, they cast well on light line, and their suspending nature helps keep them from snagging bottom on a slow retrieve. The technique used with these swimbaits is simple. Locate 2- to 6-foot flats adjacent to traditional spawning sites. Fan cast the flats…

If there were polls for such things, you’d be hard-pressed to supplant the lowly nightcrawler from the No. 1 slot as North America’s favorite live bait—unless you’re fishing somewhere near any coast. That’s where shrimp—sans the cocktail sauce—are king. Consider the handiwork of Bert “The Shrimp Man” Smith in the Florida Keys, who delivers around 20,000 live shrimp to bait shops and boat docks each day from Christmas through March. Inshore anglers love their shrimp, and they are generally easy to fish. Match your tackle to a desired species, but for most inshore and backwater eff orts, a 7- to 7 .-foot medium-heavy spinning outfit with 30-pound braided main line and about 24 inches of 20- to 40-pound fluorocarbon leader. (Snook and big reds merit the heavier leaders.) Circle hooks…

RAT-L-TRAP THEN: Cotton Cordell’s Hot Spot might have been the first lipless crankbait, but the game changed forever when Bill Lewis produced one with an internal rattle chamber back in the late 1960s. The Rat-L-Trap delivered consistent success for anglers fishing largemouth bass in stained water. Its chattering and clattering clearly showed that sound is a key factor in strike attraction. NOW: Aside from better hooks, split rings, and hardware, the modern Rat-L-Trap is basically the same lure it was when Bill Lewis started selling them off the tailgate of his station wagon near boat ramps of Toledo Bend and Caddo Lake. More than 150 million Rat-L-Traps have been sold since fishermen started throwing this vibrating lure more than 50 years ago. ($7; rat-l-trap.com) JELLY WORM THEN: When Nick Crème…

RABBIT RERUNS • The article “A Vanishing Legacy” [Dec./ Jan. 2017] struck a chord with me. I cut my hunting teeth along Maryland’s eastern shore in the ’50s, hunting rabbits behind beagles. We could hunt from farm to farm all day. As in Alabama, that way of life no longer exists here. The thrill never duplicated. Greg Wilson Easton, MD SMALL GAME, BIG STAKES • I enjoyed the rabbit-hunting feature [“A Vanishing Legacy”]. Those folks, and others, represent our best hope for newhunter recruitment. Unfortunately, their knowledge is quickly being lost to time. I spent nearly 30 years working for two state agencies as a conservation officer and wildlife biologist. I witnessed the diminishing ranks of small-game hunters. Whitetail deer occupy the most productive wildlife habitats in America. Unfortunately these…

When it comes to fishing tackle, there’s only one metric that matters, and that’s how the rods and reels hold up under real-life fishing conditions. That’s why the Outdoor Life Tackle Test team headed back to Louisiana’s Cajun Fishing Adventure lodge to test this year’s new gear. Some 58 rods and reels made up the largest field in recent memory. Over the course of several days, our five testers— OL editors and CFA guides—spent quality time with each piece of tackle, tangled with scores of largemouths and redfish, and then drew upon that on-the-water experience to make informed scores in 10 different categories. The average of the testers’ scores in each category, plus a cumulative overall score, are reflected in the chart on p. 24. As always, the rods and…

TURN THE PAGE FOR TIP NO. 1 BUILD A PVC CACHE Make a water-tight tube, stuff it with essentials, and stash it somewhere safe but handy. A CRISIS is no time to experiment with survival skills. It’s a time for action—a time to execute techniques you’ve already mastered. Do you feel prepared? Confident? Knowledgeable? If the prospect of staking lives on your current survival abilities makes you queasy, don’t worry. Hit the books instead. OL has gathered 46 tips, skills, hacks, and projects from three of our savviest experts to help you begin, or to supplement, your training. The backyard is an ideal place to experiment with these techniques, many of which would be useful around the house in the event of a natural disaster, or worse. And if ever…

DID YOU KNOW The oldest wild turkey on record is a 15-year-old, legbanded gobbler found dead in Massachusett s. EVERY TURKEY-HUNTING vest contains the old standards, staples, and standbys. Turkey calls. Locator calls. Decoys. Saw, snips, or both. Extra shotgun shells. A headlamp. Gloves and a facemask. Camo fabric for a makeshift blind. Seating. Mosquito control. Water. Snacks. You can get by with these vest basics. But since you’re lugging the whole thing around anyway, why not add a few items from the following list and make your turkey vest work even harder to lead you to a successful hunt? THE BEST VEST 1. GLOW TACKS After putting a bird to bed, use glow tacks to mark your path out so you can come right back to the specific setup…

Gamefish like blue marlin, tarpon, and sails att ract legions of devotees due to their fighting ability and sheer beauty. Anglers shell out big bucks on big boats and high-end gear to chase them around the globe. Then there are the ugly fish. Rarely romanticized and oft en cussed at when caught, fish such as bowfin, snakeheads, and gar don’t get much respect. Yet they, too, have their groupies—anglers who are oddly att racted to some of the most hideous-looking creatures that swim. northern snakehead THE SCOOP: Native to parts of Russia, China, and the Korean Peninsula, the northern snakehead arrived in North America around 2002, appearing in the Chesapeake Bay region, the result of an intentional but illegal introduction. The northern snakehead can survive up to four days out…

Dick Turpin is a tinkerer with a sense of history. An institution around his hometown of Lincoln, Neb., Turpin is a shade-tree comedian, a deft woodworker, and a turkeycall maestro. He’s the source of many of the insights and hacks that Joe Arterburn details in his feature on making and tweaking turkey calls (p. 50). Turpin borrows skills from craftsmen who came before him. His box-and-striker pocket turkey call, for instance, is a version of an early American call that hasn’t changed much since Daniel Boone’s time But fiddlers fiddle, and Turpin is forever tweaking the angles of his calls’ lids, and thinning or thickening their walls to produce new and different sounds. In this way, he’s like another famous tweaker of sound instruments, the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari. You…

SPINNING EDITOR’S CHOICE FITZGERALD VURSA score: 94.3 price: $130 Trevor Fitzgerald is a phenomenal professional bass angler —competing on both the BASS and FLW circuits. What he has learned on the water comes shining through in the design of his namesake rods. This is evident in the new Vursa, a rod built on a highmodulus 30-ton blank. Fitted with American Tackle Microwave guides and an American Tackle AT reel seat and handle, this rod is incredibly lightweight, even with its painted exterior. We were impressed with the guide train and its lack of flexure. This rigidity transmits vibration better than spongier, spring-style single-foot guides. The result is a rod that lets you feel every nuance of structure and the bait’s action as if you were hardwired to the line. It…

Training started the moment you gathered that litt le ball of fur up in your arms for the first time, and it never ends. It is a continuum of more and bigger distractions your dog must learn to ignore while executing a command, and “finished dog” is always a relative term. You can’t go wrong with a few basics: Rick Smith, son of legendary trainer Delmar Smith, says your dog should stop, go away from you, and come back to you when you want. The devil, of course, is in the details. Every dog progresses at his own pace, but here are some rough guidelines to follow on your first year (or so) together. AGE 2 TO 4 MONTHS Acquaint your apprentice with people, places, grooming, doctoring, and—once vaccinations are…

NEW ZEALAND ABOVE ME—WAY ABOVE ME, NEARLY AT THE SKYTOP CREST OF THIS JAGGED MOUNTAIN IN NEW ZEALAND’S SOUTHERN ALPS—A SHAGGY ANIMAL MOVES OUT OF THE DEEPENING SHADOWS OF A VERTICAL GNEISS CHUTE. I CAN JUST MAKE OUT STOCKY HORNS THROUGH MY BINOCULAR. IT’S A TAHR, A WILD GOAT NATIVE TO THE HIMALAYAS, AND THIS ONE IS A BIG, BLOCKY BULL WITH A FLOWING CHARCOAL COAT. HE’S EXACTLY WHAT I’M AFTER. I SCAN THE MOUNTAIN, BATHED IN THE GOLDEN LIGHT OF AN ALPINE EVENING, LOOKING FOR A ROUTE THROUGH HEADWALLS AND BOULDER FIELDS THAT MIGHT GET ME CLOSE ENOUGH TO HIM FOR A SHOT. I’m mentally preparing for a blacknight pack-out in the shattering steep, wondering how much juice is in my headlamp batteries and how much of the bull…

MUSKIES over the abyss are typically shallow in the water column. Guide Rob Manthei says it’s easy to make the mistake of fishing beneath them. “In cisco-based lakes, I usually fish no differently than if I were casting to shallow weed edges,” he says. “Double-bladed bucktails (1), large minnowbaits (2), and soft -plastics like the Bull Dawgs are great, but at times I prefer Red October tubes (3) for the additional hangtime.” On a perch-based lake, Manthei chooses Bull Dawgs that are whitebellied- walleye patt erns (4) or black, or a perch- colored Triple D crankbait. “It’s important to cover the water column from 5 feet down to the tops of the sand grass, because muskies could be anywhere in that depth range,” he says. Manthei matches the hatch when…