posted on May 20, 2010 11:59
For three years running and for reasons you could care less about, I once again find myself suffering from a severe case of winter blues. It is not terminal however, and by the time you read this spring will be making me feel much better.
To get through the doldrums of living through tough winters in the frozen north one must stay mentally busy. Since our archery season runs to the first of the year, early winter flies by quickly. In fact I hardly noticed there was eight inches of snow on the ground when I shot my deer on December 22nd. However, I did notice the fourteen inches of snow we received over Christmas.
Fortunately, early January finds us visiting the annual Archery Trade Association Show. That yearly emersion into everything archery is enough to sustain me for most of the month. This year’s show proved to be a pleasant surprise. Attendance of both manufacturers and dealers was very high and the manufacturers were writing tons of orders. As always there were many great new products but of greatest interest to me was the tremendous amount of dealer traffic the crossbow companies were receiving. While observing this increased attention I remembered that not many years ago we of the crossbow persuasion were considered akin to a colony of lepers.
My, how times have changed. The crossbow booths were among the busiest of the entire show. What once was a simple task of cruising through the small booths visiting with old friends has become a ‘sit back and wait for the dang place to clear out’ approach. That level of interest speaks volumes about how effective we are becoming at educating the modern hunter on the fact that a crossbow is just another bow and should be included in archery seasons. While we still have a long way to go, it is obvious we have gained a great deal more acceptance and no longer need to feel like lepers.
Once the euphoric tingle of the show wears off, I still have to deal with February and March, two very boring months for a guy that likes open water and ground you can actually sink a shovel into, not push snow off of. Normally I would pass this time by working more and using the extra dollars to spend a little time down south. The downturn in the housing economy of the last three years has made both of these solutions unattainable.
TV HUNTING SHOWS
This winter I subscribed to the Outdoor, Sportsman, and Versus channels from my cable provider and I could not believe how many hunting shows are out there, some hard to watch, some good and others great.
Here are some observations; I was thrilled to see crossbows used in several shows. The last time I had access to any of these channels was six years ago and nobody ever carried a crossbow. It was great to note that the crossbow hunters never took a shot a compound hunter could not take.
Regular readers of this magazine know I have an aversion to some words hunters use when talking about deer hunting. “Harvest” and “Expert” are two of them. After watching many shows I now have another, “‘Shooter”. Show after show it was; “Here comes a shooter” or “Man, that’s a shooter” and best of all “We had six bucks in the field and one of them was a shooter”. Heck dang. When my freezer is empty they are all “shooters”.
The host of the show Arrow Affliction must be a heavy metal rock fanatic. The head banging music coupled with fast frame video makes this show unpleasant to watch. Maybe it is my age, but I associate my time in the woods with peace and tranquility, not music that would blast the squirrels from the trees.
God bless us squirrels.