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:

Hovey’s Outdoor Adventures Radio Show Blog http://www.hoveysoutdooradventures.wordpress.com

YouTube video on hunting Georgia’s Cumberland Island http://youtu.be/bp6rQ-VGg-M

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