Possum Pond is named for a 2700 acre hunting section of land within the State of Florida Forest Service. The wildlife is managed by the FWC, Florida Wildlife Commission. This area was in part of the Babcock Ranch and comprises of nearly 68,000 acres and was granted to the State of Florida for preservation. You can read more about Babcock Preserve by going here https://myfwc.com/recreation/cooperative/babcock-ranch-preserve/
This 2700 acre track, Possum Pond, is just one of several similar tracks, some smaller and some larger. Each named track has a limited number of card holders that are allowed access via the main dirt road. Generally each track has a designated locations for their campers. Possum Pond has ten such card holders, each with two additional guest cards. The yearly cost can be divided among all the card holder, but only the initial ten get keys to the main gate and guest card holders can only enter with one of the initial ten.
The yearly cost for Possum Pond was $37, 000.00, which may sound a bit absurd, but the cost for other private hunting lands are quite a bit more than that. So when divided up, the
cost to each of the ten card holders is $3700.00 and that could essentially be further divided by 3 guest card holders which can bring the total costs down to about $1234.00 for the year. The hunting leases are for 5 years, then your add your name and information for your area and in July the FWC draws a single name for each of the hunt areas. They are all rotational and not drawn at the same time so other areas come up each year.
My Son was invited by one of his friends when one of the other card holders dropped out and his spot was up for grabs by the hunt group. My son said yes after seeing the property and we got in on the second year of the 5 year lease. My son and I each split the cost between us which was about $1850.00 for the year. We hooked up my 24 ft camper and parked it out at the PP and began making several projects to make it more comfortable.
We built a raise 6 ft. wide deck the length of the camper to both doors. Then we added a 4ft by 8 ft outside shower with hot/cold water shower valve from the campers bathroom. I built a large 3 sided concrete block fire pit ,where we had hoped to roast a hog on but somehow that escaped us. We set up 2- 500 watt LED flood lights in the pine trees which came. in handy for cleaning animals at night after the evening hunt. The generator ran all night long keeping the camper cool with the AC in the summer. We never needed heat as it just didn't get all that cold except for a couple of days each year.
People ask me all the time "what do you hunt out there"? Well, there was no shortage of wild hogs, which could be hunted all year. There were more than enough Whitetail Deer and
Osceola Turkey to fill your quota for the year. We hunted from tree stands that are about 12 ft or so off the ground and well camouflaged. We were allowed to set up feeding stations that held about 75 pounds of yellow corn and controlled by a solar powered system that you could set for any amount of spins up time in seconds to through out the corn around the stand. You can set the number to times per day the feed could go off, we set early morning and late afternoon for about 6 seconds. That is more than enough to get the animals to keep coming into our feeders. We had three hunt sites with feeders that we could go to which worked out well if we had three of us hunting which was not very often. In fact I usually would go out by myself, when I was the main card holder, during the middle of the week when there was no one else around, just me on 2700 acres and the coyotes and owls singing all night long.
The only problem that we have experienced is some our feeders were too low to the ground. They were still about 6' from the ground up to the motor
and the rotating disc that throws out the corn. Well, that turned out to be just the right height for a black bear. Black bears are well knowledgable about those strange looking devices that smell way to good to pass up for a meal. One did, right after putting about 100 lbs of corn in the hopper. He/she came in and looked it over and then stood up and grabbed the motor
and snapped it off the barrel feeder and proceeded to eat 100 lbs of corn. Wild hogs will also get rather rowdy sometimes, and a big ole boar has more than enough power to knock over a feeder and find a way to get the snap-off lid loose to feed on a big meal. Getting back to the bears, we got bigger and better steel pipes legs and raised that
feeder up to where that bear could never reach it. The pipe legs are 10' long and bolted to the other existing feeder legs then secured to steel fence post driven into the ground 2' and u-bolts used to secure to the pipe legs to the posts.
I was thinking to myself when we raised that sucker up that it would take a flying circus bear to reach that feeder. My son is holding one of the 10' pipe legs up next to the feeder and it was well over 2' short of the motor. Eventually we ended up moving that feeder to another site and lowered the legs some, but the motor base is still about 7-8' above the ground when you raise the feeder up.
So when I did go hunting I needed to arrive at the hunt stand a good hour before actual shooting light, which is 30 minutes before the sun rises over the horizon. It takes me about 15 minutes just to park my truck and get my gear out and start walking to the stand. Once at the stand we have ropes hanging down on either side to attach our guns, back pack and whatever else needed to be hauled up the stand. I could not carry that stuff up with me as I used a hunter safety vest and climbing rope so as not become a piled up heap of mess on the ground should I fall off the ladder. Once up into the double wide stand and the shooting/safety bar is in place you have all the room you need. So I am either hunting with a rifle, a scoped 30 cal. M1 military carbine from WW2 or a scoped Marlin 30-30rifle or a 200 pound pull cross bow. All are equally deadly at the ranges of our feeder to the stand, which is about 35 yards. There is really no need to place the feeders out any further and all of the above weapons are really an overkill but they do the job.
Big boar wild hogs are usually a nuisance animal as they will run off deer and other hogs and dominate a feeder. So with that in mind we try to eliminate them whenever possible.
With that said, these guys are super cautious when coming into a stand area, ofter taking their sweet time in smelling the air and stopping to look around. I have had them circle my tree stand and feeder location just to make sure its ok to move in. These guys have a preference to generally only come in after dark, really dark. So dark my video camera can't record and I can barley make out the hog after he finally commits. You are at this point picking out his outline and the head is usually on the "big end". My son and I each shot a big boar hog
back to back right at dark thirty. I got in my tuck to go help retrieve his first, which turned out to be one heck of a retrieve. I had to drive between trees and over palmettos to get close enough for 2-20' tow straps together and back him out onto the road. Once on the road we left him there and did the same for the other hog and drug him back to the first one and strapped him up and towed the pair back to camp at about 9:30 that night. We just left them where they were and hauled them off the next morning. We probably killed about 6 or so each year. Once they get that big they are no good to eat and in fact they smell as if they were dead already.
One method that I used to get these hogs to come into the feeders is to used an attractant, I call mine "Florida Swine Sauce" The receipt is secrete, but it starts out with used motor oil. All I can say that this stuff works so well that the pine trees that we put it on have been rubber down to the inner bark with some smaller trees completely pushed over and out of the ground. If you buy a commercially made product you would pay about $25.00 for a quart bottle plus shipping. Hell, we used 2 quarts on our three tree stands sites. I have people ask me all the time about my cross bow and if that things can really kill ahog. "Hell Yes"! I said. This thing is deadly at 35-40 yards, grouping 3 arrows/bolts within a 2 inch circle. At that distance it takes approximately a little over 1/4 second to hit the target. The only drawback about crossbows in general is that they are loud, but at that distance that arrow/bolt can hit you before you can blink your eye. Like all bows, the kill comes more from the arrow passing completely through the animal after passing through the heart or lungs. Either way, the animal runs out of blood before going too far if the hit was good. They have been times when the hit went through the heart and the broadhead stuck in the opposite shoulder of the hog and dropping him right in his tracks. Thump and on the ground.
I have yet to kill a deer with my crossbow, only hogs, but I have had hundreds of chances to harvest one. I prefer to harvest a young Doe as the meat is much better. If I am going to harvest, then its is for the meat. That doesn't apply to hogs. A sow hog generally always eats well, even up to over 400 pounds. A young boar hog up to 75 pounds is my cut-off point. That doesn't mean you can't eat the bigger ones, but when they sexually mature and the testosterone is flowing they just don't eat right for me, and besides they stink. I have harvested 3 hogs with rifles and 2 with the crossbow. I hit another large boar late one evening and intentionally shot it through the vitals hoping it would run off and die as I did not want to repeat a late night retrieval just to toss him in the heap pile for the coyotes to eat. The second hog was a nice size eating 100 pounder, but my shot was just a little low. I think she heard the bow go off and raised her head up and the arrow/bolt went through her neck. I was aiming at her head with a broadhead that would crush bone. The video showed her raising up and then jumped up as the arrow/bolt went
through. She took off quickly at first but then after 15 yards she stopped and slowly walked off. There are "No Follow Up Shots" with a cross bow, it takes too long. I watched her just slowly walk off and stopping and looking around several times, all of which are signs of loosing blood and getting disorientated. I got down to check the arrow/bolt and it was red with blood and some blood on the ground but not as much as I should have seen if the hit was good. I followed her trail as far as the last position that I saw her and even followed several trails but still could not find blood. I watched for buzzards the next day but didn't see any unless the coyotes got her that night.
To be honest, I could have killed many more hogs and deer than what I did, but it becomes a factor that I only have so much room in my 2 freezers. I had my 30-30 one evening waiting for that big boar hog to show up when I saw 2 hogs running in, then 2 more, then 4 came until I counted 13 hogs all pushing and shoving to get to the corn. One of them was a big boar hog red in color bu the ground action was furious and I could never get a clean shot. I think that was the one I shot with the crossbow a week later. I know I hit him as the arrow/bolt was covered in blood as I waited for just the perfect angle to get a complete pass thru.
So 4 hogs, plus two unrecovered, 2 doe deer after the regular deer season and used my anterless tag to harvest them. I have to chuckle about these 2 deer that I harvested, as I kept thinking the tags were doe tags, as this was what they were many years ago. On both kills, I texted my son at another stand,"should I shoot the other deer"? as I had both tags with me. He said absolutely. But I didn't, as we still had some time and I wanted him to shoot one.
It turns out that the FWC changed the ruling from doe to anterless, as too many buck deer were being killed because their horns had already fallen off and that they looked like a doe deer at the time of the anterless tag season. On both occasions, I could have harvested 2 deer both afternoons and this does not include the buck 5 deer limit that I could have harvested during the regular gun season. I could have limited out the last two years as there were no shortage of buck coming into the feeders both early morning and late afternoon. The only shortage was freezer space.
I had in the past never cared much for wild turkey, just didn't like the taste. One morning around 9 am I was lowering my gun and backpack down and heard what sounded like someone pounding a stake into the ground. It was loud and I just could not
figure out who would be in our area as this was middle week and I was the only one in camp. Then I looked up to see the magnificent Tom Turkey strutting and putting...that was the sound I heard. Unfortunately for me my gun was 10 feet below me and there was no way I was going to get it up without Ole Tom seeing me, so I just admired his strutting and putting. A couple of weeks later a pair of Toms come in from another direction and I decided to take one of them. I aimed at the bottom of his neck hoping
to take out the vitals and not too much meat. The shot from my M1 must have been a bit too low as the Ole Tom just slowly walked off. Meanwhile, the second bird took to the air and not really seeing me that high up almost flew into my stand. I watched the Tom I shot at as he slowly walked away looking left and right. He was now out to about 50 yards and so I put the cross hairs directly in the center of his butt and let the second shot fly. That one downed him immediately. So people may wonder why did I shoot him in the butt? Well, that is exactly where you should aim for, as this will surely take out all of his vital organs...and it did.
I was really anxious about the following deer season, however our hunting lease was up to be redrawn in July.We had in our hunting group 30 names of just the hunters, not including the wives. But there is no way of knowing how many names are posted to the FCW website for the Possum Pond draw. The first draw was a young kid, not in our group, that apparently did not know about how the system works and when the FWC required a $1000.00 non-refundable deposit, he dropped out. Now the whole process begins over again and we did not get it the second time around. So all of the campers, structures and any equipment had to be removed in 30 days. We got lucky as the guy that got lucky came by and said we could leave the wood deck and fire-pit. I dismantled the outside shower and loaded up my camper and sadly said goodby to Ole Possum Pond. It was a good memorial 3 years of hunting and camping and just being out in the woods, and to think that it was only one hour drive from home to camp. The photo below from a video clip that was my Christmas card for 2022, which was a sunrise from my favorite hunt stand. Sunrise was my favorite hunt time to begin the day, and sad to say that this chapter in my life has now come to a closed.
J. Michael
No comments:
Post a Comment