Got up to Christian County about 12:00 noon on Thursday afternoon. Met up with Dan Kendall and he got us settled in and gave us the run down for the hunt. He leases a ton of land and has different farms you can hunt. If you want to hunt the woods you can, if you want to run and gun you can, if you want to hunt over dekes from a blind you can do that too. He has many different places that you can hunt to fit your style and be all by yourself.
This trip was to get our foster son Allen his first bird. He's been with us about 3 years now and he loves to hunt but doesn't have a lot of time for it between football....and girls... !! He wanted to take a trip, so Dans place was naturally the best set-up for us.
After packing away our stuff, me and Allen hopped in our truck and went over to the farm we had chose to hunt.
We got out of the truck at 2:45 and by 3:10 we were on a gobbling bird. He was strutting and milling around in the corner of a field that couldn't be seen from the road. We snuck around and saw he was with 3 hens and wasn't budging. We decided to make use of the remaining daylight we had to quietly and covertly learn the exact lay of the land and see if we could get a count of gobblers on the farm. We pin-pointed several flying up at dusk on a ridge that ran parallel to a 200 acre wheat field.
Friday morning we couldn't get to exactly where we needed to be, due to roosting gobblers so close to the roadbed that ran along a bench below the top of the ridge. We set up about 65-70 yards from the bird that we had originally been on the evening before. He decided to pitch out directly down to the field and out of range for us. As soon as he hit the ground it started raining. It had rained 3" on Wednesday and now it was raining again. We decided to go down to his level before any hens went to him, he really wanted no part of any excited calling or live hens and by now it's raining harder....a lot harder......
We let all the turkeys walk off around a point in the field and went back to the truck and grabbed a ground blind and 2 hen dekes. We went back in, set up the nice dry blind in a spot in that corner where all the birds had been the evening before and all morning that day. We got the 2 decoys out without being spotted and started calling like 2 birds just chattering. The tom came back around the point and saw the set-up after a few calls and started making his way in. Allen got tore up watching him take 2 hours to come 250 yds to just clucking and purring, but when he got to the dekes, Allen was ready.
One well placed 3.5" load of Hevi 6's at 30 yds hammered him. Allen had his first bird !!
20 lbs. 10 oz.
10.5" beard
1" spurs
It then proceeded to rain over 10" the next 2 1/2 days. When we left this morning every field was ankle deep in water and some areas are severly flooded as I type this. I hunted every minute of the hunt but it wasn't about me or meant to be, we did what we went to do, and i've got the next 2 weeks off and it's time for ol' Dad to hunt now.
