New Member from Brazos Valley area (Southern Grimes Co.)

[Vance Goodson]

Howdy everybody! My name is Vance and I'm addicted to hog hunting.

LOL. I saw that as the most fitting introduction to this site.

I've been a hog hunter all of my life, I started off at a very young age going with my dad running hogs with dogs and catching and tying (live). It has seemingly gotten harder and harder to find landowners that are willing to allow you on their places with dogs these days though because so many people hunt and disrespect the land and the landowners requests and give us responsible hunters a bad name. A buddy and I have recently (past 2 years) started a little non-profit business of targeting and night hunting problem hogs for local landowners. We just do it to help others out and because we enjoy it. We have about 6-7 properties that we can hunt at this time and from last Spring-now we have removed over 60 hogs. I know that's not a lot compared to some of yall's score cards but between me working full-time and him working and going to college and hunting when we can, we don't think we are doing to bad. I do know that we aren't killing them off fast enough to hurt their numbers though.

 

[TEXASLAWMAN]

Welcome! Looking forward to hearing some of your hunting stories and pictures!

 

[Vance Goodson]

You sir, are the proprietary reason that I joined this forum. Your videos and pictures are astounding. I wish I had the thermal equipment that you use, we could sure be a lot more efficient then. We are still running spotlights and XLR 250 "green" kill lights. You are also the reason that I am fixing to either build or buy a 6.8SPC upper to switch out with my .223 upper. I look forward to being a member of this community.

 

[BigRedDog]

Welcome aboard

 

[TEXASLAWMAN]

Well maybe some day we can meet up and you can look through the stuff in person. With the right bullet the. 6.8 is great with little to no recoil!

 

[Ident Marking]

Welcome to the Site!

 

[Vance Goodson]

TEXASLAWMAN, that would be awesome. I have an old gen1 night vision monocular and when I bought it I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Truth is you can only see about 75 yards with it, the IR works pretty good on it, but it is old technology and isn't the greatest. I have a buddy that has some gen3 military grade night vision and he says its awesome but in my mind nothing compares to the thermal when it comes to spotting and shooting at any distance from the videos and reviews that I have seen. The gun that you have your WN-1000 mounted on is it a dedicated night gun or can it still be used during the day? I know that thermal is unnecessary for daytime shooting, what I mean is, is the reticle visible at all times even with the thermal off? I want to save up and purchase 1 optic for my gun that can be used for daylight and pitch black shooting that way I don't have to swap guns or swap optics for different scenarios, or is that even possible?

 

[FrankT]

Welcome Vance....you are not alone,. for now I use about the same equipment you do. Good luck!

 

[Chopperdrvr]

Welcome to the site.

 

[Wassman]

Welcome to the site. There are many ways to run a day/night gun, just depends on how much you want to spend.

 

[Afalex1]

Welcome. The w-1000 can be run day or night without issue.

 

[TEXASLAWMAN]

3rd gen night vision has more resolution or detail than thermal. For example with thermal I can not tell if the canine I'm looking at is a coyote or the neighbors pet. I can use the w1000 day or night thermal is not light sensitive it looks the same in full light or no light. The squirrel shooting video I did with the w1000 was daytime.

Your best bet for a daytime/nighttime rifle would be a clip on thermal or night vision. But for the clip on cost difference over a w1000 or pvs-14 you could buy multiple rifles.

 

[Vance Goodson]

Well it will be a long time before I can afford any kind of thermal or night vision. But it is definitely something that my buddy and I study and drool over often. And we have even talked about going in together on one set up and trading back and forth.

Our biggest problem with the way we run our set ups now is that several of the places we hunt right now have large sounders and we have not yet been able to eliminate an entire sounder on one trip. We try to take out the leader each time however we are still educating the rest of the sounder to the lights which decreases our success rate. But that's the main reason that I joined this forum is to learn different tips and tactics to help us boost our success rate.

 

[TEXASLAWMAN]

Ahhh I dream of seeing full sounders again!

 

[Vance Goodson]

Well you will have to come and join us one night. That's generally all we see around here. Occasionally we will catch a lone boar out by his self and they never make it. The sounders are what give us fits.

 

[TEXASLAWMAN]

Sounds like a plan! Another advantage of thermal people using spot lights don't blind it!

 

[BigRedDog]

Vance, where are you guys?

 

[FrankT]

Some of us are poor and cannot afford the hi-tech stuff, you rich folks need to send us your Night Vision you no longer use!

 

[Vance Goodson]

Haha, FrankT me and you are on the same page.

BigRedDog, I live in a little town called Shiro exactly halfway between Huntsville and College Station on Hwy 30. We have hunting properties in Anderson, Shiro and a few in between. We don't have near enough properties to do damage to the population in our area. We can generally make a full sweep of all of our spots in about 3 hours. To many other hunters have screwed that up for us already, shooting peoples cows and littering up their property so when a good responsible hunter comes along to ask for permission to hunt their land they just turn the other cheek.

 

[TEXASLAWMAN]

It's amazing to me how many people shoot cows. But sometimes farmers can be crazy too. I has a farmer show me his field totally rooted up three weeks ago. So I put a hog barrel out there in the middle of the rooting. Last night I get a call from that farmer "come get this barrel out of my field it's caused the hogs to root it up." Lol now he is claiming the hogs never rooted there until I baited. Good thing I have pictures of him in the rooted up field before the barrel.