So there are no leverguns, but it does involve a pair of 1930's vintage long recoil semi-auto shotguns. Why hunt with modern guns if you don't have to?
Last Sunday I had the most exciting turkey hunt I've ever experienced. My 16 year old son and I worked a tom for 2 1/2 hours before coaxing him into range. We had a hen within 10 steps of us for nearly an hour cutting it up. We could hear a hen'd up gobbler not that far off the whole time the hen was near us. Ultimately "our" hen went and joined the tom, so my son and I pulled back and repositioned, and then repositioned again. It was our third setup when we finally got the gobbler curious enough to come in.
What an awesome hunt and what a great hunting partner my son is!
For those into stats, the bird weighed 20 lbs with a 9 1/2" beard and 3/4" spurs. For me though the great experience with my son is much more important than trophy measurements.
And the guns: I try to do all the hunting I can with vintage guns. For turkey's this year, we used 1930's vintage long recoil shotguns. My son used a Browning A-5. 30" full choke and has a homemade extension tube to replicate an old market hunters gun.
I carried a Remington Sportsman, 28" with full choke. The Sportsman version of a Remington Model 11 (itself a Browning license) that only had a two shot magazine. When you think of it, the Sportsman was the antithesis of a market hunter's gun. Either way we only put three shells in each gun.
Some lessons are:
-An 80 year old shotgun can kill a turkey just as dead as a new shotgun.
-You don't need a camouflaged shotgun with red dot sight to be successful.
-Having your son shoot a turkey makes you a whole lot prouder than if you'd shot another turkey yourself.
This turkey hunt was pretty exciting and comes close to but doesn't top the moose hunt we had together back in 2015. I wrote up that hunt here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=64535 The pictures are gone from that thread due to photobucket, but the story is still a good one.
And thanks to Pete44ru for the tips on how to put pics on imgur and for the suggestion that I post the story here.
Jason
