Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Back from my Zimbabwe safari... Aug-Sept 2015

I'm in Washington Dulles (at long last!) and have a couple hours to kill before my flight to DFW, so I thought I'd put up some descriptions and pics for y'all. As you know, I left for Zimbabwe on Aug 24 in search of Cape buffalo, eland, and kudu, with buff being the priority.

John Sharp (my PH) picked me up in Bulawayo on the afternoon of Aug. 26, and we proceeded to the Bubye Valley Conservancy (BVC), a privately held game park of nearly 1 million acres in the southeast corner of Zim. The BVC has to be seen to be believed. The quantities of game in there defy my powers of description. Consider numbers like this: five hundred lions. Yes; five hundred of which perhaps 6-10% are huntable males. More lion research is getting done in the BVC than in Hwenge Park, former home of the famous Cecil, simply because there's more wild lions in the BVC. Population numbers of elephant, buffalo, leopard, and rhino were cited for me, but I will refrain from putting them down here... the pressure the BVC is getting from poachers is already very high. More on that later.

Anyway, we got in and settled into very comfortable accommodations at Chamalaya Camp, one of 9 or 10 permanent camps in the BVC. Here's some views of the camp:









Sorry about the poor quality of the sundowner pic... I accidentally deleted the right one, all I have left is this poor one.

Anyway, that's camp. Just me, my PH, 4 hunting staff, 2 skinners, and 4 camp workers. Talk about being taken care of! I'm told it's like this in most safari camps, at least traditional ones.

So next morning we were up bright and early and out in the car scouting for game. After we did the obligatory shooting of paper to "make sure the sights are on target" (i.e., the PH needs to start assessing the client's ability to handle his rifle(s) first thing). We punched holes in paper and we were off. I was astounded by the numbers of game animals. Zebra and wildebeest in mixed herds of several hundred at every waterhole, with smaller herds in between... tens of thousands of them! Impala were all over the place as well. John pointed out a couple of nice rams and asked me if I'd like to take one later, and I told him not really. They just don't do much for me, impala. They're smaller than a Texas whitetail (which are damn small!) and aside from the lyre-shaped horns on the males and the wonderful way they run, there's not much to them.

That first morning we saw several family groups of lions, both spotted and brown hyena, giraffe by the score, and even a group of bachelor elephants, young fellows. We also spotted a solitary black rhino and caught a glimpse of a herd of buffalo bulls. The skittishness of the buff surprised me... but these critters are very shy about people, despite being huge and cantankerous.

Finally John pulled over near a waterhole where 200-300 zebra and wildebeest were milling around and trying to decide if we were a threat or what, and said, "Right, let's see if that new rifle of yours can kill a zebra." They pronounce it ZEBB-ra over there, unlike our own ZEE-bra way of saying it.

My new rifle is a Kimber Caprivi in 375 H&H Magnum, which I bought in June after a prolonged search for an African rifle that gave me fits. More on that another day, perhaps. Suffice to say I'd bought the Caprivi from Whittaker guns, which is managed by one of our 24HCF members, and who gave me a helluva deal on a great, great rifle!

So anyway, John told me to grab my rifle, he picked the shooting sticks out of the back of the car, and we wandered off into the bush to pick out a zebra stallion. It didn't take long. John pointed out the one he wanted me to shoot, about 100 yards off, and told me he wanted me to shoot the top of the chevron on the stallion's shoulder. I settled the rifle in the canvas, took a shooting breath, and released the firing pin. BOOM! One dead zebra. The 300 gr Swift A-Frame went right through him, broke both shoulders, and carried across the Limpopo River and on over South Africa, finally coming to rest somewhere in Antarctica.

Here's some dead zebra pics:





[img]http://i1200.photobucket.com/a...ra%20Gibson%20Amos_zpsiyotsel5.jpg[/img]

This last pic shows Gibson, John's skinner of many years, and Amos, his assistant. Gibson and I spent a good bit of quality animal-autopsy time together. My PH was a bit surprised at my eagerness to spend time in the skinning shed, as most hunters would just as soon leave that chore to the menials. I was eager to learn more about the anatomy and toughness of African animals, though, and the only way to do that is to get bloody and wield the knife yourself.

John admits he's done a great deal of animal postmortem dissection himself. We spent many an hour sitting at the campfire over the 10 days of our safari, talking about bullets, terminal ballistics of various calibers/bullets, and "stopping" power versus hunting.

Those of you who are familiar with my law enforcement background and/or my training company, Tactical Anatomy Systems LLC, will not be surprised to learn I spent much of my time in Africa discussing and otherwise researching these topics. More on that later.