50 Boars – Part One

There is no better feeling then loading up the ute with the dogs and quad and heading off on an adventure with your best mate. It was November 2015 and I left Darwin on route to Cape York over 2600kms away, the first leg after work I headed to meet up with Bryce 1600km away in the Gulf. It had been over 18 months since we have been out for a hunt so the blood was pumping.

I arrived to Bryce’s the following arvo and after catching up and meeting local legend Craig Logan and his family we decided to sneak out for a quick night time run on the quads, within 10 mins of leaving home we hit out first pigs, peeling out a medium sized boar and giving it the treatment. It wasn’t a cracker but we were stoked and pushed on, unfortunately we didn’t have any more luck and the boys had work in the morning so we pulled pin and headed home. The plan was for Bryce to sneak away from work at about lunch time and we would make our way the remaining 1000kms up the Cape. Towing 2 quads, 800 litres of fuel, 6 dogs, a weeks’ worth of food supplies, hunting gear and filming equipment over 1000ks of some the worst roads in Australia is no walk in the park. Luckily Bryces rig the Di Cruiser and tandem trailer is the ultimate weapon.

Bryce ended up having to work back late and it wasn’t until about 5pm until we could get on the road. Not the ideal time to be hitting the road buts it’s what we had to work with. Bryce started off the drive and we fuelled up in Normanton and pushed north towards the Cape. At about 1am Bryce started getting sleepy so I took the rains and pushed on until we were somewhere south of Coen and we pulled up at about 4am. As we pulled over we noticed we had shredded a tyre. Not ideal but we rolled the swags out and dealt with the tyre in the morning.

After a bit of a sleep in we made good time and pushed onto our final destination. We unloaded the bike and got the dogs settled and got our selves ready for the following days action,

We woke early on day 3 all excited about what lay ahead. We were hitting a spot we hadn’t hunted for over a year and we knew the boars would be prime. We picked up the barge and headed for the boat ramp to load the quads. The barge hadn’t been touched for about 10 months but it started first pop and things were looking good. We pushed the barge off the trailer and thats when things turned pear shaped. The steering wheel wouldn’t budge, after a quick inspection I realised the steering arm on the outboard had seized. After a quick bit of Bush Mechanics and a bit of lubrication and we were back in action. We got to our spot and the hunt began.

It was a bit of a late start due to the unforeseen problems with the barge but it was starting to warm up and within minutes of reaching a creek we were into boars, I had a new pup Sally with me and I was excited to see how she would go. First boar up and Dave and Horse both had a good chew and then as luck would have it the next three popped out of the creek in my direction. Dave was onto them and Sally was looking pretty keen having a bark and a chew. Some how in the excitement of all the action I managed to clip a tree or ant hill and it busted my tyre off the rim. The small compressors we were carrying could not pump enough air into the tyre to get it back on the rim. We had heard of people using aerosol cans before to set a tyre on a rim before but we weren’t carrying any with us at the time. Thats when I had the idea that maybe we could use the fuel we were carrying for the quads, Bryce was skeptical on the idea as he thought the tyre might explode. But he is pretty easily convinced into most of my ideas and we decided to try our luck. I used around 20mls of fuel and sloshed it around in the tyre and used the lighter ignite the fuel and expanding the gas. It worked a treat and we were back in action. It was not long before we were smashing some more boars and the dogs were loving it. We ended up with close to 20 pigs for the day not bad considering the slow start.

After getting off to a slow start on day 3 we were keen for a bigger day on day 4, we were up early and we heading up river in the barge, the creek we were hunting had small patches of water every kilometre or so and as soon as we started hunting and we found the pools of water we were into the boars, Bryce and his Bailer Jesse the Catahoula and I had Bo the Bailer and Dave was backing up from yesterday. We were poking a long the creek and boar after boar kept popping up and the dogs were smashing them! Some of the footage we got of big Horse hitting these boars was awesome and looking back on it this was Horse’s 2nd day of hunting in a row in 40 degree heat, a champion effort. We ended up with 16 solid sets of tusks for the day and close to 20 pigs again. An awesome effort and we ended the days with two boars off one swamp. Dave was laying down on the quad bike. He had had enough. 

All the footage from this story is on Hogs Dogs and Quads 5.

The next 3 days hunting we catch even more boars, this will be featured in our next DVD with the boys Simon and Jase from All for Adventure making an appearance.

We hope you enjoy.