MV - Sengwa

Client Comment

What a ride! Parks decided a week before our hunt was to commence to not issue the two non-trophy bull elephant permits for our planned Amandundamela hunt. CMS did the yeoman’s task of quickly coming up with an alternative hunt for early season and nailed it. Sengwa is a beautiful area which I had previously hunted in 2017 with Gary Duckworth. It was hot. Really hot. The jess was thick, and game numbers were a bit lower this early, but we had great hunts nearly every day and accomplished what we set out to do. We needed to roll tires quite a lot to find tracks to follow. After several great tracking sessions, catching dagga boys and getting busted trying to get close enough for a shot in the thick stuff, we scored. At this point in my life, I don’t much care about inches. I wanted a good hunt and an old hard bossed dagga boy, and connected on day five. On hands and knees for 20 minutes, and a 20 yard shot on a marvellous old bull. All I could see was his nose and his boss. There is almost no chance without an optical site in jess this thick. Pro tip: if Crispin is cooking, and you shoot a buffalo, ask him to make oxtail stew. The best! We could have asked for a few more promising bull elephant tracks to follow, but several bulls were seen and evaluated. There are adjoining communal areas and bulls ordinarily come in this time of year to raid crops. With El Niño producing severe drought this season, the maize has completely failed. Not even enough for the elephant to bother with. Poaching is going to be a serious problem this year. Because of it the concession owners are working hard and two poachers were apprehended during our hunt. Ivory poaching has pretty much been shut down in this area, but it’s a tough year for subsistence farmers. We found a super promising old track on day eight. The track was 22 inches with good wear. When we caught him a few hours later, he was with a cow herd. Buzz and I had a bit of a squeaker in a cowherd hunting tuskless in 2022, shooting two in self-defense. Neither of us wanted to make a closer approach in the thick stuff. Nyati saw his tusks, and I decided that if we didn’t track up a good trophy bull within the next day or two, we would try to find his track again and take him as a non-trophy bull. He was big and old, with substandard ivory, the perfect non-trophy bull. We found his track again on a road at 8:30 the next morning. I decided in consultation with Buzz that it was go time. We tracked until about 11 o’clock, cut a road and rendezvoused with Eddy and the Cruiser for drinks and a snack. We started tracking again. He had rested not 100 yards from the road. He had apparently heard us and moved on, but he was not moving fast. We caught him resting in the shade in some pretty thick bush maybe 45 minutes later. After watching him for a few minutes, he became aware of us and took a few steps in our direction to investigate. He offered a partially obstructed frontal. I took the shot and he dropped straight down. He rolled onto his right side, giving me a clear view of the front of his chest, so I immediately fired the left barrel of my 470 into his chest. Buzz had taken his fingers out of his ears, and said a very forgivable bad word, as his head was about 2 feet to the left of my muzzles. You just can’t ask for a better, more fulfilling hunt, and 950 kg of meat went into local bellies.