Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Bowhunting Whats your draw weight?

Guy M,

I do not see recurves in Africa very much. A couple guys that were doing both bow and gun brought recurves recently. They were both takedown recurves for the ease of travel.

Neither was able to shoot game with the bow, only one had a shot and he missed. The issue we have for most recurves is the hide size/design. We have build most of the best archery hide locations with a type of box blind, or a 1/2 underground blind that on the outside looks like a big termite mound.

These don't always have the roof height that fits a longer recurve or long bow, but work perfect with a compound. We do have some that fit easily, and some that are close depending upon the height of the archer.

I have has a number of guys hunt with me that we build a blind of brush as needed, these have no roof and work perfectly. I'll guess I have had 100 archery hunters in my career. Of those I think maybe a dozen with recurves, the rest were compounds. If I count only the full time archery numbers, not those that also used a rifle.... The number is about 1/2 of this, I'm guessing of course but I think this is pretty accurate because they were all my clients after all!

I am able to provide a very high quality experience with a large well developed property that does only archery. There is no gun hunting allowed. It's run by archers and owned by archers. This is the really best place to hunt with bow and arrow in the whole of RSA. All the PH's are bow hunters and 100% of the staff "gets" bow hunting.

Most of the outfitters in RSA will take bow hunters, but lack the specific needs and set up development that a bow hunter would like. One of the reasons my Archery hunting trips have been so well accepted. I do get it! I set up things perfectly as if it were for myself! I never propose one of my hunters take a shot at 70 yards assuming that it's a chip shot. Few PH's understand 30 plus meters is a long shot. Most feel that distance is an impossible task because they have hunted for many years where a 50 meter shot is very close range, 75-100 is average and over 150 is a long shot!

There are a few places now that claim 100% bow hunting only. Doing my due diligence I have learned that of those there are really only a handful in the whole of Southern Africa that actually hold this rule fast. The rest offer archery only, but allow firearms to the clients to " pay the bills" when the hunters are not getting the game to pay the trophy fees.

I was a Hunting guide with hounds in Wa. and Id. for decade. I took 30-35 bear hunters a year. Many were archery hunters. Quite often the archer would be looking for arrows that fell to the ground when his bow mounted quiver went empty trying to shoot a treed bear. Shooting steeply straight up provides some unique challenges. They usually defaulted to my revolver to take the bear or finish the bear. However in almost every case they took the photo's with the bear and their bow in the picture.

In one instance a fella took a monster bear well over 20" skull. He sent me the pope and young paperwork to enter this bear into the books. He shot that bear with a friend of mines, 30.30 rifle when he shot all his arrows and only wounded this bear in the back leg. I sent back the paperwork and told him I could not be the witness to this as the bear was killed with a rifle, not the bow. This was the most angry and aggressive client of my career. He was threatening and violent to me on the phone.

This leads me to believe that in some of these archery only hunting operations that do not hold fast to the bow hunting rule. They probably carry on with the hunters using a firearm but have the bow in the photo so they can go home and tell any story they like. This is a huge benefit to the outfitters business. The friends and family are none the wiser when the stories are told the photo's posted on the net.