My new Pride and joy (Part1)

Hi there again

I thought I would start with 1 of my newest interests, Hunting.

Hunting is 1 of the healthiest activities that I (sort of) recently discovered.
For 1 you get lots of fresh air in the bush as you stalk your prey.
You get a fair amount of slow paced cardio in, I walked about 9km on the first morning of my latest hunting trip.
And then of course the meat is a lot healthier because the animals are not injected with any hormones or antibiotics
I hunted a few times before this year but never with a rifle I owned, so last year I decided to get myself a boomstick of my own and after all the licensing processes and lots of window shopping I got it.

My new pride and joy the Browning x-bolt stalker
I decided on the browning x-bolt stalker in .308, and after owning it for about 6 months it very well may be the best decision I made to date. I chose the .308 calibre because I enjoyed hunting in the bush the most and with that calibre there is nothing I can’t hunt, form Impala right up to Eland
My first hunt was on open plains, on the border of Namibia. And for me that wasn’t really hunting as the animals didn’t have a chance at those distances (I hunted in the 200m to 400m region) and it’s more like shopping combined with target practise. My next hunt was in the bushveld and I immediately fell in love with it. From the stalking to finally taking aim without a dead rest and then tracking the animal to where it lay (luckily it hasn’t been very far for me yet) felt like I earned the meat I was to enjoy from the animals I hunted. Since then all my hunts were in the bushveld.
The X-bolt is a very nice little rifle that weights only 2.9kg and has a 22” barrel, which is perfect for the bush as it is easy move around with. It has a synthetic stock, which means you don’t have to worry about it being scratched as much as you would with a wooden stock.

I started hunting mainly because it is a lot cheaper to hunt for meat than what meat costs in a butchery. Here is SA beef normally goes for an average of about R100/kg which is getting quite expensive. On the few hunts I have been my game meat works out to an average of R60/kg and that is after all the costs even for the butcher processing the game into steaks and wors etc. That to me is a very good deal, and considering that game is a lot healthier as the wild animals are freerange and organic, it makes it an even better deal.

Up next I will go a bit more in depth about my rifle and my hunting experiences so far so stay tuned if this interested you.

Cheers until next time
@joupa