Getting Comfortable with my new normal

Hello world, I started this blog to share my experiences as a southern sportsman. I am going to paint the picture about where I am in my life as of now. I am a husband and father who was torn from the working world by this beast we call Covid. I spent twelve and a half years as a service tech , manager, and R&D specialist for a local manufacturing company. I was successful and loved my job. However the current pandemic had other plans, when I say I was blindsided…..yep never saw it coming. October 1st 2020 my position was eliminated and I was given walking papers. So I entered into unemployment for the first time in my life. The unknown was exciting for about 5 minutes, then I started to ask myself “What the hell are you going to do?”. I am a high school graduate, and was a professional mechanic for many years. My problem in the current professional world is every employer is looking for a degree from an accredited university in order to sweep the floor. I have 25+ years of experience collectively and I cannot get an interview for a job pay more than 15 bucks an hour. While I am trying to pick up the pieces and figure out what I want to be when I grow up. My wife suggested that I write about something that I love, and here we are. Now that we are all caught up we can move on to the good stuff.

I love the south, so naturally I was raised in the outdoors. Hunting and Fishing were true family traditions. I got a lot of time in the outdoors as a kid and that set the foundation of my love of hunting and fishing. But unlike some I was not raised on a large farm with everything at my finger tips. Like most outdoors people in the south we either own property or lease it. I fall into the latter category. Our family had leased hunting property or we were hunting public land ever since I can remember. Sometimes our lease was an outright lease and sometimes we had a lease that we had to maintain the property or perform some kind of work for the rights to hunt said property. I learned very early that scouting and finding game quickly was an essential skill. Like most blue collar families in the south we had enough but not much more than that. Our weekends were our hunting and fishing times so when we had the time to go we made the most of our trips. Packing our gear for a weekend trip and camping with our Grandfathers, fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, and on occasion grandmothers and aunts. There were a lot of great meals had and laughs shared but most importantly the lessons learned and skills developed over the course of many years to hone the skills required to be successful while hunting.

During that period of time there were not the abundance of deer that we enjoy today. I started hunting when I was 5, we called it hunting anyway. It was more of an exploring trip with lots of sitting still and waiting with small amounts of time walking quietly through the woods looking for any small sign of our prey. Every so often we would catch a glimpse of a brown body or a flash of a white tail. Once in a while one of the elders would “get lucky” and harvest a deer. Then we had five deer tags two of which were buck tags and the others were what we called “doe tags”. We had specific days that were “doe days” and the rest of the season was buck only. I started hunting on my own when I was 10 years old. My first hunting gun was a .22 pump made by Rossi. I hunted squirrels and coons and whatever else was in season. The main rule was whatever we shot we had to eat it or give it to a family that would eat it. Alot of my early hunting years were spent hunting small game and fishing. I did try eating a raccoon and it was not bad a little greasy but all in all it was pretty good. We had a family not to far down the road that was struggling a little more than we were so every weekend I would take the harvest down to there house and drop it off. Mostly it would be a handful of squirrels and a coon or two, maybe a possum if they asked for one.

As I got to be a little older I started to hunt deer more and my first deer rifle was cowboy commemorative nickel plated Winchester 30-30. That rifle belonged to a family friend, He had one requirement for me to use the rifle. I had to put two shots in the center ring at 100 yards. The two shots were touching in the center ring of the target. I never shot a deer with that rifle but it made me feel like I was one of the best hunters in the world. Over the next several years I hunted with a marlin 30-30 that my Dad got me. Come to think of it I never shot a deer with that rifle either. Then when I turned 16 my dad bought a Mossberg 835 Ultimag with a rifled slug barrel. My first deer was a spike on a cold November afternoon in Taylor county Georgia. From That point on I was hooked on hunting whitetails in Georgia. I got my first real job shortly after that and hunting kindly took a back seat to work and girls. However it was not long until I was longing to get back out in the woods With my trusty Savage 270 That I saved up and bought myself.

To be continued………