Africa 2023

Well made it home at 3am this morning from a 10 day hunt in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. We had an awesome time. Those who made this safari were myself, my son Nick, Ray and Danielle Shepard and Randy Barnett. I think we all had a pretty good time. The hunting was tough, we had to work to get animals, this was our 4th trip over and it was our toughest hunt yet.

The group separated after spending the night in Johannesburg, with Nick and I heading to Bela Bela for my hippo and hyena hunt and the rest heading to Alldays, where we would join up later.

Sighted in guns when we arrived Bela Bela and went out to see if we could find anything. We found some hippos in the dam but had no idea if they were cows or bulls at this time. I was told there was a very high probability of not getting a hyena, possibly sitting over bait with a thermal scope would be the best, and that the hippo would be a breeze.

Went out driving the back roads that night with a flashlight and was successful on the hyena, not much of a possibility of taking him with a handgun, took him with my 9.3x62 rifle.

After 3 days of trying to decide if this one hippo was a bull, my PH made the decision to take a shot at him. I had really hoped to catch him out of the water early in the morning as a shot at the body, the size of a volkswagen is much easier to hit than something the size of a tennis ball at 50 yards when you are shooting right at water level. I took the shot late in the afternoon while he was in the water, not a perfect shot, nor a great shot but it slowed him down a little, and I was able to get several more into him when he surfaced for air.
One of the PH's from where we were hunting waded out with his .458 to try to keep the others safe, don't think it would of helped much.
there were still 2 hippos in the dam about 50 yards from this and a bunch of crocodiles, this was one of the smaller ones, guessed him about 16 foot.
I would of felt a little bad if someone got ate.

We did some more hunting at this location with Nick taking a very nice Kudu and golden wildebeest
We left Bela Bela and headed for Alldays, where we finished out our safari