Gone Hunting - See You Next Wednesday; Keep Those E-Mail Reports Coming
The longer I’m at it, the less “mad” I am at the deer on the home place. Yet, with every passing year, the more I look forward to making my annual pilgrimage to Lavaca County. It has become my own private version of traveling to Mecca.
The prime directive nowadays is to kick back around the fire, check out the starscape, eat good barbecue, do a little pond fishing, and in general, just enjoy being outdoors. It’s all about just being there.
I do plan, however, on shooting at least 10 bucks.
If you are wondering why you don’t see any blog posts for the better part of the coming week, it’s because I’ll be out in the field. I’ll be deer hunting through the weekend … and, for the last two days of the trip, fishing with my friends Kenneth and Warren Henneke of Henneke Fish Farms outside of Hallettsville while photographing big largemouth bass taken on Black Salty baitfish (optimism prevails again).
Again, I have every intention of shooting maybe as many as a dozen whitetail bucks … every one of them with my 400mm f3.5 Nikkor telephoto lens.
My ever-thoughtful wife, Liz, gave me my Christmas present early this year. Knowing that the weeks and months to come will be prime time for all of the outdoor activities that I love to participate in and document, she presented me a box … a bona fide surprise … that held inside a brand-new Nikon D80. Like my Nikon D200, its forerunner, the D80 is a high-resolution 10.2-megapixel camera .. meaning, in essence, you can blow up a shot to the size of a barn wall if you want and not lose a smidgen of quality in the process.
This time of year, when fishing and hunting seasons are both going strong, light conditions (especially immediately after the passage of a cold front) are sublime. Liz knows that the Good Lord’s canvas doesn’t get any prettier than in the period between Halloween and New Year’s Day, and as such saw to it that I received this great camera system just in time to put it to its utmost use (I do indeed love that woman … after all, she puts up with me, and I assure you, that’s saying something).
My father, Bill Bozka, Sr. of Pearland, loved Liz, too. I wish he had been alive so that I could have told him when she and I reunited in 2003, after 27 years of being apart. I wish I could have seen the smile that, as surely as the sun rises, would have spread on his face when we informed him later that the following summer we would be married.
Sadly, my dad passed away on December 11, 2001. It’s hard to believe that this December he will have been gone for a full 15 years.
He was … and I truly say this without a hint of the prejudicial bias you might automatically assume from an admittedly sentimental son … the most honest, reliable, compassionate, hard-working man I have ever known. My dad was a true family man, one who spent many years in the airline industry, working at first for Trans-Texas Airways, then Texas International Airlines, and then, when TI bought Continental Airlines (most folks think it was the other way around), Houston-based Continental.
When he was not at work, his life revolved around my mom, who he dearly loved and cherished, and my two brothers … Bill, Jr., 16 months older than me (and, carrying on the family tradition, a veteran aircraft technician for Houston-based Continental at Hobby Airport) and Bob, six years younger than me (and a very successful Edward Jones stockbroker in Friendswood, Texas, who has with great competence helped countless grateful individuals secure their retirements).
My dad did a great many things for my brothers and me. But, as I pointed out in the dedication to my book, most of all, he took us fishing. (Larry Bozka’s Saltwater Strategies: How, When & Where to Fish the Western Gulf Coast was the title of the 1998 release. 10,000 copies later, it was out of print after a mere two years, so another saltwater fishing title, greatly expanded, is now in the works). On days when my father could have gone with his fishing buddy, Jay Hall of Alvin, and not spent his time untangling so many backlashes, he took us fishing, anyway.
He also took us deer hunting. Those long-ago days spent at deer camp, with my dad and my uncles Jim Bozka and Matt Bozka, and their close friend, lifelong charter skipper Herschel Gollott of Freeport, constitute the most precious memories of my life.
There are two places where to this day I feel closest to my father … anchored up on the “redfish hole” off of the North Galveston Jetty, and at the family place near the tiny town of Vienna in Lavaca County, 11 miles southeast of Hallettsville. He brought in an insulated Weingarten’s grocery trailer, hoisted it on blocks, and working with us, helped us turn it into the camp that we still enjoy sleeping in today. That trailer, to the uneducated eye, is just a trailer.
To me, it’s a sanctuary, and a wonderful place of reflection, remembering the nights my father and I spent by the fire, swapping stories and telling jokes, reminiscing about friends passed on, just elated to be there where the family’s roots run deeper than the live oak trees that cover the property from one end to the other.
When you shut the doors to the old grocery trailer, the lights truly go out. It’s as dark as looking in your pocket. I sleep in that trailer like nowhere else, looking at the plaque-mounted, felt-covered racks of bucks taken in years past, each with its own story, and remembering my dad and the conversations we shared. Being in that trailer, absorbing its ambience and the calming essence of the post oaks around it, makes me feel like he’s still there.
Because, in spirit, he is.
I’m headed to the family place tomorrow. And despite my preference for observing and photographing deer more so these days than shooting them, I still love “hunting” at the family place more than anything else I do in the course of the year. It is there, again, where I sense my father’s spirit, his rugged resolve and determination and his unmitigated love of everything outdoors … and especially, the priceless Lavaca County getaway.
We are blessed to have that place. Though a four-year-old TPWD management plan, now extended to 61 counties in the state, has had a remarkable impact on the quantity and quality of bucks we see, we will never have the monster brand of whitetail “muy grandes” endemic to intensively-managed (and largely high-fenced) ranches in South Texas.
No matter. “Trophy” is a relative word, and in our part of the country, where we hunt bucks that are as wild as March hair, a 15-inch-wide 10-pointer is indeed a serious trophy. And a challenging one, too. The animals pay attention when you make noise, or move too much.
You actually have to hunt them.
I spoke yesterday with Lavaca County TPWD biologist Joel Wagner, and he confirmed to me that those of us who hunt the aforementioned counties are poised to see bigger whitetails than we have ever seen before.
It’s as surprising as it is ironic. When I was a kid, I imagined that by the year 2006 (at that time, an infinitely futuristic and faraway time frame) we would have no deer left. Instead, we now have so many deer in the county that Wagner is encouraging all hunters to fill all of their department-issued antlerless deer tags (in our area, he says that deer density has actually increased in recent years, from one deer per 9 acres to one deer per 7 acres).
It’s a major success story, one that bears witness to the value of cooperation between landowners, hunters, and the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. More and more people are managing smaller and smaller plots of land; yet, their willingness to work together with each other and the State of Texas is yielding better-quality whitetail bucks than the region has ever produced.
I will, come Saturday morning, climb up into the stand and revel in the sighting a batch of young 8-points, the wide-racked 6-pointer we have repeatedly documented on my Cuddeback game camera, and with any luck, both of the two beautiful but immature 10-pointers that said game camera has captured in the past 12 months. Using that 400mm, I’ll shoot ‘em all.
Again, though, for the most part I will simply rejoice at being there. And I will give thanks to God above that I had a father who placed such a priority on introducing his sons to the joys of outdoor recreation, both fishing and hunting.
If your father is still alive, do anything you can to spend some time in the field with him. Ditto for any family member with whom you share a love for the outdoors. If you can spend time together … deer hunting, goose hunting (both seasons open this weekend), bass fishing, bay fishing or whatever you like to do, stop planning to do it and instead just do it.
I assure you, when a man is in the final days of his life, it is those moments that will be relived and relished.
As a pastor told me long ago, and as I used to close the SportsRadio 610 Outdoor Show …
“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a blessing.”
Be safe in the field, and enjoy the moments you share.
They only happen once.
Keep your line wet and your powder dry …
Larry
P.S: If you have content and/or photos you would like to share, send e-mails to larry@coastalanglers.com and I will answer them as soon as I get settled back into the home office on Wednesday afternoon of next week. Many thanks …
Boz
Howdy. I am 
