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Having made only one trip so far, with Tollie's African Safaris in May of 09, I knew the Blue Wildebeeste had to be on my list, though it was a few days into my trip though before my PH decided to work with me on this. It all started out rather poorly when I pulled my first shot in Africa at about 10AM on the first day of hunting, blowing a shot on a nice Blesbuck and starting what wound up being a very long day of tracking a wounded animal. I started the second day telling him I wanted a Blue Wildebeeste, after witnessing much gibberish(to me anyhow)between the PH and tracker we went to an area where they "sometimes" see wildebeest. After spending several hours walking in the bush we stumbled on very nice Springbuck at about 250 yards, which I managed to take with one very clean shot DRT. After pictures and loading up the Springbuck we began to make our way out when we spotted a herd of Impala moving fast through the brush, my PH and I exited the bakkie and moved a few hundred yards off into the bush to a spot we espected to be in their path, of course they didn't come our way, but still a nice ram moved out into the open on a run and I managed to drop him with one shot. After we loaded the ram up I observed quite a bit of gibberish again at which point I asked my PH what was being discussed and he explained, "James(the tracker)says if you can shoot like that, you can hunt blue wildebeeste". So on my 3rd day in Africa I managed to hunt one of my most desired animals for this safari, and I must say I was a bit nervous, Tollie had explained to me the previous night that the Blue is born sick and that he gets better the more lead you give him, and honestly not being that confident in my shooting has always been an issue for me. So we started out looking the next morning driving and glssing hillsides in a very rocky, almost lunar looking, landscape when a solitary bull stepped our of the bush behind us, downhill a bit and accross a ravine, probably 200 yrds. I moved off to get a better line of sight on him and got into position, all the while my PH keeps telling me emphatically that I must "hit him good", as if I intended to hit him poorly. The first shot was a bit high, went through both lungs but only bruised the heart at this he took off and I put two more into his shoulder, he managed to get to the ridge of the hill and at about 250 yrds I put a final parting Texas heart shot on him which he responded to by kicking in the air and running off. As I watched him run off I felt like I had hit him good and hard, but deflated that he had not fallen, thankfully we found him about 75 yrds down the hill from where I had put the final shot on him, 4 180 gr TTSX's had done their work, to my dissappointment none were recovered. He was a amazing old bruiser, not the widest, but thick and full of character with a broken tip and a heavily scarred body, wouldn't have traded him for anything.

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Edited by NitroX (13/09/10 08:48 PM)

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