Git-R-Done

© By Othmar Vohringer

The past week has been busy for Heidi and me. On Saturday, August 30, my wife and I visited the Merritt country fair and rodeo. The event started with a parade trough the town core. It was not a big parade but very nicely done. Where else do you see the Mayor of a small town riding ahead of the parade on an ATV handing out candy to the kids? The parade offered plenty of cheerful subjects of Heidi armed with the camera.

After the parade we headed out to the rodeo grounds. That was my little piece of heaven. Not many people know that, but one of my childhood dreams was to become a professional rodeo rider. As things often go in life I choose a different career, but rodeo remains to this day the only sport I truly care about. In my humble opinion rodeo is the only sport I can think of that separates the man from the boys.

After Sunday it was back to work again. Most of the remaining long weekend I spent locked up in my office writing articles and query letters to hunting magazine editors. Between writing I worked on the “Outdoors with Othmar Vohringer” website. Finally, I am done with it. It took over a year to get this project finish. Time and again I changed layouts and graphics until I arrived at something that I am proud of and that I am sure the visitors will like. All that now remains to do is to edit all the writing, which will take about a month or so to get it perfect.

On Tuesday I purchased a new video camera, arriving at home I spent much of the day studying the manual and testing all the functions on the camera. After two days I still just barely have a grasp of what this new generation video cameras are capable of doing. In the end though it will be worth the trouble and headaches. I have planed for some time now to make my own videos for the seminars, hunter education courses and for the website. What the videos are about shall not be revealed at the moment. Suffice to say that the videos will be educational and entertaining to watch. I will write more about this endeavor as time goes on and enough footage has been collected, edited and put on the new website and here on this blog. Before I got started with planning and script writing I asked hunters from all over North America what they would like to see in a video. The information I gathered will be taken to heart and reflected in my future video work.

Today, Wednesday, Heidi and I drove to a new lake that we never have visited before. Low and behold we saw trout, big trout, jumping every few seconds. So guess where I will be taking our boat tomorrow morning early. I still want for Heidi to catch her first fish. The last time out fishing she came very close but then the fish, a beautiful trout, made one last leap and came of the barb less hook. No cigar. Well that’s fishing for you. You lose some and you win some. With the trout jumping as they did today Heidi may have a good chance of reeling one in the boat tomorrow. The regulations say that we can use barbed hooks on this lake and that will make it easier for a novice to prevent the fish from coming loose again.

On Saturday it is off to the shooting range with my brand new shotgun, the rifle and the bow. The new shotgun needs to be patterned and the rifle has a new scope that needs to be sighted in. Once that it all done I need to shoot my bow with broadheads on the arrows. I have been shooting with field up to now to get back into archery shape. There will be lots of shooting on Saturday, all day long. Hunting season opens here on September 10 and I will be ready for it come storm or high water. On previous scouting trips I have seen many nice bucks and lots of does. My scouting trips for grouse have yielded encouraging results too. Like I said, after Saturday my shotgun, rifle, bow and me will be ready to tap into that bountiful supply of delicious table fare.

On the Whitetail Deer Passion blog I have added a new feature called “Weekly Smart Hunting Strategy Tips”. Each week I will write a column about some of the things that have helped me to become a better deer hunter. I welcome tips and tricks from my readers and fellow outdoor bloggers that would like to contribute to that weekly feature. The email address to contact me can be found in the right had panel of this and all my other blogs.

The way things shape up I fear the next week will be as busy as the one just past. My regular contributions to this blog may suffer a bit because of upcoming hunting season and all the other commitments that have me pretty much tied down for a while but I will make an honest effort to keep you all posted and updated.