Newfoundland Moose/Bear-Headed to camp!

[jt13]

Somehow have 4G on a remote glassing point in central NL. We're officially past the half way point and no critters down yet. Seen 2 moose, a cow in the glow of the headlights yesterday morning and the fiance let a "button" bull walk this morning.

Weather has been terrible. Off and on rain everyday. 15-30 mph winds. Incredibly slow hunting.

Outfitter is saying the whole island is off to a rough start of hunting season from what they're hearing

Some cool country, nice people, and fantastic food are the upsides.

Now back to glassing!

 

[Bowhuntrben]

Hoping for a change in luck!

 

[PAGOAT]

Sorry to hear that, I hope you get a nice one the next few days.

 

[buffybr]

Bummer about the weather and your lack of critters.
I'm flying to Gander tomorrow for my hunt.
Thanks for your Toronto checklist.
Do I need to do anything in Toronto with my bag containing ammo?
Good luck on the rest of your hunt.

 

[ol_spark]

Hope you get some stable weather. That would help things a bunch. Good luck.

 

[LCH]

Go get 'em @Jt13 !

 

[jt13]

Its not over until its over.... With this trip, more true words have never been spoken.

Yesterday, on our last day of the hunt, some magical stuff happened....unbelievable





I've got lots of info for you guys and I'm gonna do some typing during my layover in Toronto. About to hop on the plane from Gander at the moment

A very serious thank you for all the kind words of support, we certainly appreciated reading them when we got the occasional moment of cell service. It helped keep our spirits up and going strong until the very end!

 

[unclemoe]

congrats! look forward to hearing the stories!!

 

[Bowhuntrben]

Woohoo! Congrats!

 

[WNC2500]

Awesome!! Congrats! Looks like the weather broke a little.

 

[Pucky Freak]

Nice critters! Way to stick with it

 

[wheels]

congrats

 

[JLS]

Nice work!

 

[ashersdad]

That’s awesome! Sometimes it all happens at the last moment. Way to stick with it.

 

[brownbear932008]

On our trip my buddy had all but given up. On the last day we spotted a few moose from miles away. 8 miles later he had a bull on the ground and we trucked it 8 miles back to camp arriving just after dark. I'll never forget that excitement and that feeling. Congrats!!!!

 

[muleyfreak08]

Good luck!

 

[jt13]

PART ONE:

So this trip was about 3 years in the making. Fall of 2016 my fiance (then girlfriend) and I decided we wanted to go on a guided hunt. We wanted to do something that we couldnt DIY easily and have a reasonable chance of success. We were really looking for the best bang for our buck.

In Pennsylvania, we are spoiled by having the Great American Outdoors show local to us in Harrisburg. So we went outfitter shopping in Feb of 2017 and settled on a drive-in Newfoundland moose hunt out of Gander, NL with a nice owner/operator couple. I'll leave their names out of this post because I didnt run it by them first, but can PM the info to anyone that wants it. I decided that only one of us was going to moose hunt, cost being the retricting factor, and gave that privilege to the lady.

I decided on them because they were friendly, down to earth, the price was right, free pick up and drop off to the airport, and the real kicker was the bear tag. Most, if not all, outfitters we spoke to charged a non-hunter/observer fee of $800-1500. The folks we chose charged $1000 non-hunter/observer fee BUT also they allowed me to put the "stumble on or baited" bear tag that they offer to moose hunters in my name for only an extra $300 (cost of the tag) and $600 harvest fee if successful. The trip went from being a moose hunt with an observer to a moose and bear hunt right then and there and we were sold.

As far as communication goes, we talked with the outfitter mostly by email over the 2.5 years between booking and the hunt. They emailed to check in once or twice and then the year of the hunt they provided transportation, ferry, hotel info, etc. About 6 months out we decided to fly rather than drive, mostly due to the extra time required away from work. We booked 2 roundtrip tickets to Gander from Newark Intl for about $450 each.

Next step is getting CBP form 4457 filled out at a US Customs and Border Patrol office before your flight. This form basically verifies that you owned the firearms before you left the country and is used on reentry to the US. The form can be printed at home BUT NOT SIGNED until its checked by US CBP. You take your firearm and the paperwork into the office, they check the serial numbers, sign the form, and away you go. Quick and painless.

The next form that you need is the Canadian Firearms form (the form number is eluding me at the moment). Its basically the paper that allows you to temporarily possess a firearm on Canadian soil. This form can be printed at home, prefilled out, but also NOT SIGNED until instructed to do so by Canada border personnel.

This now gets us to where I left off in my last post which looked like this:

-Arrive 2.5 hours early to departing flight.
-Have gun checked as baggage at the baggage counter.
-Follow the gun to a security room where they xray it, open it, put paperwork inside, then take it straight to the plane
-Fly to Toronto
-Exit plane with customs declaration form they give you in flight
-Enter customs and declare firearms and ammo
-Proceed out of customs to oversized baggage claim area where firearm will be waiting for you
-Take firearms to customs officers in the baggage claim area
-Fill out Canadian firearms possession forms, pay $25
-Drop off firearm at special/oversize baggage security
-Go through security again with all your carry on bags and whats on your person
-IMPORTANT NOTE: Checked baggage that dont contain firearms will go straight on to the next plane. This Canadian customs process took an hour and a half
-From this point any other layovers should have your checked baggage (including firearms) put from one plane to the next, no special attention needed.

Now to the hunt

 

[jt13]

PART TWO:

After being picked up at the hotel we were brought to the lodge which was about an hour down the highway and another hour down dirt and gravel logging roads. Our main source of transportation were going to be ATVs, or bikes, as they call them. They were very nice and well kept two-seater Can-Am 500s. The lodges were recently renovated and kind of set up in a cottage style. Much nicer place than I anticipated, we even had cell signal boosters, wifi, and satellite TV. My fiance and I were the only two hunters in camp and these folks did a great job of making us feel welcome and wasnt awkward at all (like I feared it would be).

Morning one we set out to a location that we would come to be very familiar with. A glassing point that was about 30 minutes from camp that was touted as their honey hole. This one bog, or series of bogs really, was where they harvest nearly half their moose on any particular year. We started out at this location every morning, the guide was sure that if we kept at it we would see moose there.

As mentioned on my hilltop post, the weather was sour for us from Monday-Wednesday. Gusting winds and heavy rains made for bad hunting conditions and poor animal movement but there was hope. The forecast for Thursday and Friday improved and gave us two good, clear, frosty mornings that proved to make all the difference.

Along with our old-faithful morning glassing spot we hunted a number of different ways. We hiked out into some bogs near the roads and had calling sessions. We rode and hiked way off the reservation into untouched country and glassed. We hunted from a blind over a large bog. We even climbed up into some treestands. We also did quite a bit of what most would consider road hunting, essentially riding straight up to bogs in hope that there would be a moose standing there. The hunting style was not quite what I had expected, I think quite a bit of the moose hunting in Newfoundland takes place from the seat of a motorized vehicle. Speaking to a few hunters at the airport that were in other camps it sounds like the most common, and successful, tactic. I think most of the hunters they get prefer to stick close to the roads, so thats their default method. With that being said, any time that I suggested hiking in or getting away from the bikes, the guide obliged without question or complaint.

When the weather finally turned, things started looking up. We had a pretty neat calling session with some bulls on Thursday morning. There was lots of grunting back and forth and it felt like any minute a bull would clear the treeline and present a shot, but it didnt happen. Thursday afternoon proved unproductive, and come to think of it, all of our afternoons were void of moose. All were spotted between 6-9am.

Friday came around and at this point we had essentially come to terms with the fact that we likely were going home empty handed. I put off bear hunting the whole week to be with my fiance hunting moose and the chances of turning up a moose on our last morning were slim. We were in good spirits, probably the highest all week really, and after a nice breakfast we headed out once more to our old faithful glassing spot.

Things were different that day however.... as we approached the crest of the hill we noticed extremely fresh moose tracks in the sand near where we had the caller set the day before when we had the back and forth with the bull. We topped the hill, pulled up the binos and started checking things out. Our guides spidey-senses were tingling so he side stepped about 15 feet to the right to get a different angle than us and, then quickly, chaos ensued. A bull was standing about 150 yards out in the bog, hidden behind a tree from me and my fiances view. The guide not so subtlety called out the location of the bull, offered his shoulder as a rifle rest, and a shot rang out. It was a hit. She racked another round, fired, a miss. Trying to get an angle for the third shot, she fired off hand and hit the bull, which was now running. This one put the bull down.

Rifle/ammo was a Tikka T3, 30-06, 165 gr. Nosler Partition. Complete pass through on shot one, shot 2 got stuck in the spine and dropped the bull immediately.

Success

 

[jt13]

PART THREE:

The relief, the joy, the excitement from an event like this is unmatched. It was a truly amazing experience. A bull moose on the last day...

After getting the bull cut up, hung up, skinned, and put in game bags I decided to try and put that bear tag to use. This particular camp runs just a couple bait sites that they bait with camp scraps. They keep cameras on the baits to keep track of activity and one of them had a bear that was coming in like clockwork. We hit the bear stand at noon which was surprisingly low to the ground in incredibly close to the bait barrel. Im talking about an 8ft high platform that was 15 feet from the barrel... close quarters...

According to the photos, which I reviewed with the guide and his wife the night before just for fun, this bear usually comes in within an hour of the bait being placed. So when 5pm rolled around I pretty well assumed that this bear was not showing up since it had broken from routine. As I was mentally bad-mouthing how boring hunting over bait is, we heard a foot step.. then another.. and another.. Before we could barely get our heads turned to the direction of the sound, a bear cleared the pinetrees behind us at about 20 yards. It walked straight under the platform we were in and stopped.... There was now a bear's back less than 5 feet underneath us....It is now that it occurs to me what its doing down there! It is eating the crumbs from my granola bar that had fallen between the slats of the floor of the platform about an hour or so prior. When the bear was done with my crumbs it worked over to the barrel and I didnt waste any time. There was a perfect broadside shot opportunity so I took it. The bear only went about 30 yards and piled up! Turns out a 150 grain Rem Corelokt out of a 270 can be pretty effective at near point blank range! The bear turned out to be a large beautiful sow. Just like that, in a few hours we went from skunked to tagged out.

Stand by for the return trip through customs, gear usage, tips, and suggestions. I apologize for any typos or grammatical errors, I typed all this on my phone on the flight back home!!

 

[jt13]

PART FOUR:

The trip home was a little more eventful than the trip there. First issue we had was having ammo and guns in the same case, which is okay for the trip into canada but apparently not okay for the trip home. Second atfter arriving in Toronto you go through US customs before you continue on to your final destination. This was extremely time consuming, upwards of two hours. Last issue was that they couldnt fit my baggage on the plane and was not waiting for us when we arrived. I had to wait for the next plane from Toronto to come in which was fortunately only about 90 minutes later.

What I liked about the hunt:
-Moose sign everywhere
-No other hunters around
-Friendly people
-Great food
-Great service even though only 2 in camp

What I didnt like :
-More road hunting than expected
-Low moose sightings but most likely the poor weather
-Cigarette smoke. Our guide like to smoke while we were hunting. Wasnt a huge fan, but didn't say anything.

Things I would do/bring different next time:
-Better fitting rubber boots (something you can tighten around your calves)
-Slightly warmer clothes (our temps were 27-72 degrees)
-Better gloves (hands were frozen on the ATV rides)
-Bring less regular clothes (overpacked on the camp clothes)

Stuff that was great:
-Rain gear (Sitka Thunderhead and Downpour)
-Merino gear (worn everyday with no smell)
-Cerakoted/stainless guns (everything is damp in NL)

Clothing/Gear:
-Double socks almost everyday- merino
-Merino Firstlite baselayers
-Merino Firstlite sawtooth hybrid
-Merino puffy
-Pants- Skre, Guide Pants, nylon hiking pants
-Sitka Thunderhead jacket/pants
-Gloves- fingerless wool and mechanix gloves
-Muck boots
-Tenzing 2220
-Tikka T3, 30-06 stainless
-TC Venture, 270, cerakoted
-On the cold days I was wearing nearly every item on this list, could've dressed warmer...