Hovey's Outdoor Adventures Archives - WebTalkRadio.net

New guns, clothes, knives, crossbows, outdoor-related services and some fun are presented from the 2013 Shot Show held at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas.

More than 20 vendors are interviewed, 10 associated YouTube videos were shot and the show was described on both my Backyard Deer Hunting and Hovey’s Outdoor Adventures Radio Show blogs. What was new and interesting was a three-barreled shotgun from Chappa, hammerless muzzleloading rifle from Traditions, Arsenal’s Siamese-twin 1911s, new knives from Buck, Case and Queen Cutlery as well as crossbows from Barnett, Excalibur and TenPoint that are shorter, slimmer, and lighter than ever before.

Shooting accessories included a new green laser sight from Crimson Trace, holographic sight for crossbows from EOTech and a do-it-yourself interior barrel finish from Dynamic Finishes that prevents “crud ring” formation from using pelletitized powders in muzzleloading guns.

I paid more attention to clothes for the under-served part of the hunting market by including interviews with Lucky Bums, who makes clothes, seats, packs and outdoor equipment for junior hunters; and Prois who has developed a line of innovative hunting gear for women. I did not forget the guys, and I also did interviews with Irish Setter about their outdoor boots and with Manzella about their nearly 40 varieties of outdoor-hunting gloves.

Just for fun, I also filmed Joey Rocketshoes Dillon’s fast and fancy revolver act at the Cimarron Arms booth where he juggled a pair of Colt Peacemaker revolvers. He started working on this at about age 6 with a cap pistol. This video appears along with the others from the Shot Show the wmhoveysmith channel.

Ads on the show include those from Fix It, Inc., to get you out of any little troubles that you might get into in Las Vegas and Ersatz Vegas to whom you pay your allotted gambling money and they send you receipts and cheap Vegas souvenirs to save you the expense of going. More importantly, this removes the risk of you gambling away everything you own and having to sell your daughter out of bible college to a Middle Eastern prince to settle the family’s debts.

Blunderbuss Swan Hunt

Blunderbusses are strange guns and the people who enjoy shooting them are perhaps even stranger, including me. When I first saw one advertised in Sportsman’s Guide I knew that I would need to get it and wring it out. The .54 caliber gun was shot at outdoor writers’ conferences in Mississippi and Tennessee, hunted small game and deer in Georgia and was now off to hunt the nation’s largest waterfowl in North Carolina.

The 20-gauge is usually considered to be a small-bore shotgun compared to 11, 12 and 10 gauge guns, that are considered medium-bore guns. (Big-bore shotguns start at the 8-gauge and go up to 2-gauge punt guns which are not legal in the U.S. for waterfowl.) Because the Traditions-made gun’s barrel is a cylinder-bored 26-gauge, its maximum effective throw of shot is about a 1-ounce load. You can shoot more shot out the barrel, but you lose any pretense of a pattern and your shot winds up as a hollow-centered donut. This condition is aggravated because I am also using hand-cut cardboard and foam wads derived from beer cartons and egg crates.

Given enough time, I can usually count on getting at least one swan to decoy within the 20-25 yard kill range of the blunderbuss. I loaded it with 70-grains of Hodgdon’s TripleSeven powder and 1-ounce of mixed steel and HeviShot 4s with a Cream of Wheat buffer between the over-powder wad and the shot. This load generated sharp recoil from the light-weight gun.

I was at Bodie Island, got the blind I wanted for each of the three days The first two mornings’ hunt produced only two distant swan. The last day I hunted all day and had several flights over me just before dark. All but one bird was out of range and offered a butt-profile shot that I did not take. I downed a bird by taking a shot at what turned out to be the last flight of the day. The bird was beyond my 25-yard limit, but I broke a wing. I finished it by chasing it down with a Mossberg 500 3-inch pump cartridge shotgun.

This hunt demonstrated that you can take down swan with a 20-gauge gun, but the trick is to get them in close and take neck-head shots. HeviShot 4s from a 20-gauge can be effective when used in this manner, but wait for a good shot.

Ads on the show include those from Invasive Species Control, whose motto is,” We kill ‘um, you eat ‘um.” and SIN, Inc. (Synthetic Industrial Non-Nutritives, Inc.) who announced that its Puke Vodka is now available for home therapy in 5-gallon and 1-gallon pails as well as in 55-gallon drums and tank cars for use by alcoholic treatment and rehabilitation centers.

The cooking section consisted of a visit to the Sanctuary Vineyards and a product tasting with the Wine Maker which included my own pear wine made from my back-yard pear trees.

The Year’s Adventures, 2012

2012’s adventures started with a bang with swan hunts on the year’s first two shows and ending with a reading of my original play “A Visit from Auntie Thresa Claus” on the Annual Christmas show. Twenty-three original shows were produced with two 1 1/2-hour shows and one 2-hour show.

Events covered included the Shot Show, Atlanta Blade Show, NRA’s National Convention and Quality Deer Management Association’s Annual Meeting. Communities featured in the occasional “Hunting Small Town America” series were Dawson, Helen and St. Marys, in Georgia as well as North Carolina’s Outer Banks and Ashland City, Tennessee. Successful hunts included swan, wild hogs, turkeys and deer featuring muzzleloading shotguns, blunderbuss, pistols and crossbow along with bowfishing Tennessee’s Cumberland River.

Limited finances in a down economy restricted 2012’s activities largely to the Southeastern States, but nonetheless provided some unusual show opportunities, such as investigating the Gray Fossil Site near Johnson City, Tennessee, where Miocene elephants, rhinos, tapirs, bears and alligators are found as fossil remains at a site that is even more productive than the La Brea Tar Pits in California.

Besides the usual hunting stories, two original stories were aired including a Christmas reading of my play “A visit from Auntie Thresa Claus” and “Watermelon Smith” which is about a slave who wins his freedom after a successful Mississippi River boat race where he de-scales a boiler by throwing a watermelon onto the boiler’s red-hot coals.

Downloads from WebTalkRadio.net steadily increased to about 20,000 a week, with the most popularly downloaded shows being those about the trade shows, handgun hunting and outdoor personalities such as Larry Weishuhn, Bill Booth, Margaret Hice, The Swamp People and The Turtle Man. The most frequently searched for items concerned Hice and the now-discontinued Tree Lounge Tree Stands.

Related activities included publishing softcover and E-book versions of X-Treme Muzzleloading: Fur, fowl and dangerous game with muzzleloading rifles, pistols and smoothbores, and an updated E-book edition of Practical Bowfishing. Over 100 YouTube videos were published during the year which received 300,000 views. Many of these videos were related to subjects covered in “Hovey’s Outdoor Adventures Radio Show Blog,” which had 19,000 views and my “Backyard Deer Hunting Blog” which had 100,000 views last year. A 20-video series on “Starting your own outdoor business” is included among among the current 180 videos on the wmhoveysmith Channel.

Kickstarter Projects that were attempted and failed during 2012 included funding for the production of my play A Visit from Auntie Thresa Claus (read on my annual Christmas shows) and funding to permit an upgrade of this radio show. Sponsorships continued to be elusive during 2012, and this lack of support threatens the survival of the program. Although there has been a lot of activity, this has not generated sufficient income to sustain the show.

The first show of 2013 also got off to a shooting start with two successful hunts on Georgia’s Ossabaw and Cumberland islands for deer and hogs with muzzleloading pistols, including CVA’s Optima .50-caliber single shot, Cabela’s stainless steel 1858 Remington-pattern Buffalo Revolver with a 10-inch barrel and adjustable sights and Traditions’ 1858 Remington Sheriff’s Model with a 5 1/2-inch barrel which performs duties as a back-up muzzleloading handgun to kill a small wounded deer at 50-yards. A link to my Cumberland Island hunt YouTube video appears below:

Deer and hogs were hunted with blunderbuss and pistols in November and December on Georgia’s Ossabaw and Cumberland Islands. These regular management hunts are held by the State Dept. of Fish and Game and The National Park Service to help control these species and protect sea turtle eggs from being consumed by feral hogs.
By making advance application to the appropriate State and Federal agencies, anyone can go on these three-day camp-out hunts. Transportation is available from Kilkenny Marina to Ossabaw Island and hunters ride on a public ferry boat that leaves from St. Marys to the hunt camp at Plum Orchard on Cumberland Island. Two application cycles are necessary to be drawn for any of the Ossabaw hunts, but the six hunts on Cumberland Island seldom fill. These are very nearly a sure thing if the application is made soon after the period opens June 1.

Hogs may be harvested without limit on both islands and two deer may be taken which do not count towards the state limit of 12 deer a year. Hunts on each of the islands start with archery only hunts, then primitive weapon hunts (muzzleloaders, crossbows and bows on Ossabaw and muzzleloaders, crossbows, bows and cartridge handguns on Cumberland) which are followed by hunts with conventional guns and hog-only hunts.
The success rate is usually very good for repeat hunters who have learned the island. The temptation is to take a walking tour, rather than hunting; but those who seriously stay on stand and hunt, will usually get some game. On Ossabaw this year I took one deer, and had chances at others, and on Cumberland I took two hogs. All of these were shot from tree stands with three muzzleloading pistols.
Facilities on both island include hot showers, coolers for the game, indoor restrooms, electronic charging stations and a dock for loading and unloading. The weather may be highly variable. Temperatures may range to the 80s to down to near 0 degrees F. Rain is common during Georgia’s winter months, but their was none on this year’s hunts.
My hunting tools included a .54-caliber blunderbuss with a round-ball load that was made by Traditions and sold in kit form from Sportsman’s Guide, two models of replica 1858 Remington percussion revolvers from Traditions and Cabelas and a CVA .50-caliber Optima pistol. Game was taken with the handguns, but the blunderbuss failed to score due to mechanical problems and user error.
The cooking section include hints on how to cook cuts of wild-hog meat in the hunting camp and pre-cook one-pot meals that may be frozen and taken on the hunt to provide quick, easy-to-fix eats for hungry hunters.
Ads on this show include a special Halloween hunt-land navigation experience, SIN’s (Synthetic Non-nutritive Inc’s) new popcorn and whole hogs supplied with an accessory pack of hog hair and wood dirt to replicate the real hunt experience

This special edition features a reading of Hovey’s original Christmas play, “A Visit from Auntie Thresa Claus,” a cold Christmas at Copper Center, Alaska, making Southern cornbread dressing, recent activities and a sign-off from the Christmas Chipmunk.

The uninterrupted reading of the play is sponsored by Velcro Wall, the leader in child suspension systems, who introduces the “Rent a Dungeon” for the 2012 holiday season so you can hang up your kids for a couple of hours while they play Dungeon in a sound-proof room. Velcro also reminds listeners of their “Kid Harness Division” which allows kids to be harnessed up for doing healthy work such as pulling sleds, carts and plows, rather than getting no exercise while being transported in cars or being pushed around grocery stores in shopping carts.

Updates are given for Ursus, a once overweight yellow Lab, that has successfully undergone knee surgery and weight reduction; hunts related in the Blunderbuss Chronicles; an interesting deer-save with an 1858 replica percussion revolver and the still-pending results from Hovey’s standing for a re-examination for the renewal of his license as a Professional Geologist.