Hunters often find the need to tinker with gear

Published 12:36 am Saturday, January 20, 2018

Despite all the stores, all the catalogs and all the available websites, hunters are seldom completely satisfied with new gear and absolutely hate to get rid of anything for which they have become accustomed.

I recently spent a morning sewing a new elastic band into a camouflage facemask I have owned for at least 20 years. I have two or three others, but I keep going back to this particular one. I have tried to find another one like it, but have not in 10 years of looking. I have not given up.

The reason I like it is because I wear glasses and it has a wire frame that conforms around them, making them more comfortable than the other.

The elastic strap actually gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, but I was able to make it fit by first tying the strap in a knot to make it tighter and then tucking the top edge of the mask inside my cap.

Apparently my head has shrunk because during a recent hunt, the mask kept slipping down to my chin. That resulted in the morning’s sewing session.

I have to admit that like hunting gear, I have plenty of needles and thread. What I don’t have is the skill, so the result is not pretty. On the other hand, no Duck tape was required.

I used to think I was not a gear tinkerer, but I have discovered that is not the case. Like the friend who took a perfectly good pair of slip-on hunting boots and had a zipper added to make them easier to put on, or the legion of hunters who have added extra stakes to make spinning-wing decoys sit up higher, I too must refine whatever I buy.

Like most hunters, I buy products I like, but then think if I had designed it I would have done this or that differently. Every hunter has … or will.

It happened to me this year when I realized to be successful at deer hunting, I was going to have to think outside the box, as in deer blind. The acorn crop in the Hill Country was unbelievable early in the season. We were seeing deer, but they were not coming to feeders.

I decided early if I was going to do any good, I was going to have to move away from the feeders and find some areas where the deer were feeding on the acorns that had fallen and the corn that we put out using a tailgate feeder.

That was not a difficult task. Find an oak tree dropping acorns, any tree, then lean back on another nearby and wait.

The problem is that now in my 60s, I am not very good at shooting offhand. Fact is I never was. I have adopted a small sand bag for use on deer blind windows and highly recommend everyone do that, especially if you have young shooters. If it were not for the sand bags, my shooting technique would be more watching the crosshairs swirl around from right to left until they found the target and pull the trigger.

If I was that unsteady in the blind, I knew shooting from the ground would be impossible. I thought I found a solution with the Caldwell Deadshot FieldPod Max, a lightweight tripod with basically a bench sled mounted on top.

I watched the videos and read the reports, all of which were positive except for one thing. The tripod only extended to 48 inches. Universally, hunters complained that was not high enough — especially if trying to use it from inside a deer blind.

Like hunters do, I ignored their complaints thinking I could make it work, and in fact my first shot was perfect. The rest was rock steady and the deer dropped like a rock.

However, for that shot I was sitting on the ground. The next time I used it, I was sitting on a stool. It was too short. And sure enough, it would not work from the blind, which was disappointing.

Unable to add to the legs, I found a shorter seat — a dove stool — I could use late in the season when hunting a wheat field late in the afternoons. But still it was too short and soon I was back on the ground.

So with the season over, the quest begins not to find a tripod that stands taller, but a way to take this one and add 6 inches to it.

As someone once said, hunting season never ends, we just stop going to the field for awhile while working with our gear to make it better for next year.