I need to make a trip to Vanclieve real soon. I have to go to the taxidermist and pick up some things i have gotten mounted. I have two deer, two ducks, a bass, and a trout all mounted. I asked him to save everything until it was all finished. It has been almost a year since i gave it to him to mount. I always save stuff I want to get mounted until I have enough stuff to last him a while. I have one deer to be mounted that I shot last weekend. It was my first deer of the year. Im going duck hunting next weekend, so hopefully I will have a few ducks to get mounted by then. I have several geese and mallard ducks mounted, but I want to get a wood duck, and a pintail duck mounted next.
Most of these mounts are at the hunting camp my family owns. We have a house with a huge living room in the middle that we all hang stuff in. Along with there, I have several things mounted at my house in Gulfport. My father an I are avid hunters, and we have many trophies. All of our friends that come to the house or camp say that we have the best collection. At home we have somewhere around 20 deer mounted, 3 turkeys, 4 hogs, 10 or 12 ducks, two bobcats, and numerious fish from both fresh and salt water. we keep them all in our hunting room, where we keep all of our hunting and fishing stuff. My mother hates it, but she doesn't say much since we keep it in one room upstairs instead of all over the house.

I am really looking foward to Decemeber 17. It is my birthday, and on that day I am driving with two of my friends to Iowa to stay at a hunting lodge until the 23 to do some bowhunting. We will be at the Timber Ghost Ranch. This ranch is amazing, and is known for the huge deer that are harvested off it every year. We bought the trip back in September, and now it can't come fast enough for us. We are excited about the trip, and know it is gonna be like nothing be have ever done before. It will only be the third time I have hunted outside of the state. I feel pretty sure that we will harvest some nice deer at this place because of their high ratio of kills to hunts. The deer that live on the ranch dwarf the deer here in South MS, and I really want to harvest one of the monsters. The trip was extremely expensive. I worked over time every day this past summer to save the money for this trip. Just to step foot on the ranch is costing me 5,000 dollars. It sounds like a lot, but for a deer of their quality im happy to pay it. The three of us worked in the afternoons everyday after we got off of our other jobs doing landscaping all over South MS. We made a lot of money, but that was the hardest work I have ever done for extra spending money. Hopefully I kill something or all that work will have been done for nothing

For this weekend, I am going to check out some new hunting land in North MS. I think it is about 4 hours north, but thats not so bad. If it is not any thing good, than i will be going back home to hunt on the new 1000 acres myself and two friends have just leased for hunting. Since we have each killed some deer already this season, we are all pumped about hunting again out there. We have done work out there all summer getting it ready for this hunting season, and I believe its gonna be a great year. We are planning on doing nothin but bow hunting out there, and have decided not to use guns. We want the deer to feel safe on our land, and we are managing these deer to become true trophies. We will only shoot bucks that are trophies, and some management bucks that will not grow to our expectations. Along with the bucks we will be trying to harvest 40 does, and every hog that we see. We do not want any hogs on the land because they are destroying the food plots we put in for the deer over the past summer. Hopefully this weekend I will be lucky enough to shoot some more deer with my bow. I am hoping to harvest at least 10 deer this year out of this land. However, I will only shoot one more trophy buck, and two management bucks off the land. I really want to shoot some does to get them off the land, and to add to the sausage we are making out of the deer we are shooting

Over the Fall break, I went back home to do some hunting in South MS. On wednesday afternoon, I sat in my treestand from 2 until dark. I didn't see anything, but I was still confident that I would shoot something over the break. Thursday was a wash out, an I did not hunt at all on Thursday. Friday Morning I was in the woods an hour before day light. Around ten that morning I was about to climb down from the tree I was hunting in, and then I heard something walking towards me. Soon after that, I had a black panther walk just a few yards from my tree. That was all I saw that morning, but later that afternoon, I had three massive hogs walk in, but I was unable to get a clean shot on any of them. Everyone else that night saw deer, one guy missed a doe, and one guy had two nice bucks just out of bow range infront of him. That Saturday afternoon, we all killed deer. I shot two, my good friend shot one, and my other friend shot one. I had a nice buck walk under my tree, and shortly after, I made a nice shot and the deer didn't run far. Shortly after that while I was waiting to climb down, I had a doe walk into the same spot the other deer walked into. It was a repeat, and I shot that deer as well for a management deer. It was a great week, and even better, a good start to hunting season this year.

Two weeks ago I fished a bass tournament on Pearl River down in Log Town, MS. The morning started off slow. I was catching trout one after the other, but could not find any bass. At nine that morning I caught my first keeper bass on a spinner bait. He was roughly two pounds, and just what I needed to get me going. After i caught that fish I decided that the fish were up shallower than I had been fishing. I Fished back out of the canal I caught my first one in, and continued fishing into other canals in the area. At one that afternoon, I still only had one fish. I fished until three that afternoon, and never caught another fish. It was a dissappointment, because I had spent so much money in hopes of winning. My weekend was gone, and I more broke at that point than I was when I got that early that morning.

Well, i didn't fish my tournament this weekend after all. I decided to go dove hunting instead. It was a good shoot, everyone shot a number of birds, and we all let a few get by us. That night like five of my friends and i were bowling and decided to go back and try a morning hunt. That was about 10 o' clock when that thought passed into our heads. So we all got up at around four to get into the field before daylight. As soon as it was light enough to see into the field we were shooting. The birds were coming for breakfast, and did not even mind that we were shooting them. At nine that morning, it slacked up enough to get a count of birds. Four of us had in the neighborhood of fifty birds. We decided that was enough, and went back to the house to clean birds, barbeque, and watch football all day long. All in all, it was a good weekend.