Scott Swanson
Lynn Pettit, 72, has been hunting all his life, but he says the trip he took to South Africa in September far exceeded anything else he’s experienced – by far.
Pettit and his wife Cris spent 10 days in the Eastern Cape Plains area, where he bagged six antelope – two kudu, a gemsbok, a blesbok, a wildebeest and an eland – plus a zebra that he shot for his wife as a birthday present.
Not only was it “the trip of a lifetime,” but it cost far less than something half as productive in the United States. “I’m still floating on the clouds,” Pettit said. “I’m still dreaming about it. It’s the cheapest place on earth to hunt, bar none.”
Pettit, who is retired from the Willamette/Weyerhaeuser mill in Foster, said they booked the trip with Two Waters Safaris in February at the Eugene Sportsman’s Show. Barbara signed on for a photo safari with the wife of Lynn’s guide, Brian Sealy.
He said he could have rented a rifle, but he took a gun he built for the trip: a Remington 700 with “custom everything – action, barrel, stock,” and a Shepherd scope. The rifle is spot on at 1,000 yards.
He said he shoots Berger bullets, exclusively, and they made quite an impact in Africa, where his shots ranged to 400 yards.
“One shot and the animal is done,” he said. “My guide was pretty impressed.”
Pettit said he and some of his buddies are long-range shooters, who practice with targets set up as far as 2,500 yards.
“I don’t have a gun built up like that, but my buddy does,” he said. They shoot at 18-inch plates at a mile, and 25-inch plates at 2,500 yards.
That experience paid off in Africa, at least in establishing some credibility with the locals, who noticed that Pettit wasn’t young any more.
“The guide was totally impressed. He thought when I told how well I could shoot that I was full of B.S. After I proved to him I could shoot, he stayed with me the rest of the time. The trackers called me ‘Sniper’ (pronounced ‘Snappa’).”
African guides employ trackers, who use dogs to find animals wounded by hunters, he said.
Although the trip was “exclusive – they picked me up at the airport and fed me,” it wasn’t easy hunting. He spent six of the 10 days in the bush, in brush that featured 4-inch thorns “on everything.”
“We were going slow, not making noise. I tore my jeans, but it’s not like you’re running through it like a wild man. Sometimes visibility is down to 40 yards.”
It was early spring on the southern tip of Africa, so the grass was green and high, he said.
They hunted on what are called “concessions,” large tracts of privately owned land dedicated to wildlife.
“It’s like ranching for wildlife,” Pettit said. “They are huge places. Some you can’t walk across in a day. The smallest one I hunted on was eight square miles. The largest was 28 square miles. We had it all to ourselves. Across from where we were staying, there was one owned by a young Arab sheik.”
He said he would wake up in the morning and see rhinos feeding outside the cabin. They had their horns removed because “rhinos have about a 48-hour life expectancy with a horn.”
It was not easy hunting, he said. The guide and trackers weren’t sure he would be able to handle the rigors of trekking across the terrain, “but after that first day, he stopped looking back. I was in his hip pocket the whole time,” Pettit said with obvious relish.
“It was wild. We walked all day, every day. The foliage was so high I had to learn to shoot off a stick, a tripod, when I got out in that stuff. I shot one of them, the gemsbok, with only a 9-inch window. The bullet picked it up and threw it over in the brush. My guide couldn’t believe it.”
He said the toughest hunt was for kudu, a species of antelope that rely on heavy cover in thickets for protection, whose brown and striped pelts help to camouflage them in the scrub. Pettit said he was so consumed by the challenge that he decided to go for two – one with wide horns and another with a narrow set. He’d only planned on hunting for five antelope, but the kudu presented an irrisitable challenge.
“They’re smarter than anything I’ve ever hunted,” Pettit said. “They can spot you from 2,000 yards, easily. Their ears are about 8 inches tall.
“When the wind shifts, you’ve got second and a half to shoot and they’re on their way. Literally. And we were in full camo.”
He said the hunting was so intense, he forgot to take pictures during the action.
Sealy, realizing that Pettit was a serious, very experienced hunter, took things to a new level.
“He wouldn’t let me just shoot anything. I was going to save money, and do just European mounts, but they were all telling me to get them full shoulder mounted.”
“If they’d turned me loose, I’d have shot them all in the first day. But the guide wouldn’t let me. He’d call me off. I actually could have killed 10 quality animals a day if he’d let me or if I had a lot of money. I actually turned down a record-book sable at 358 yards. He didn’t even know I was there. We watched him for 45 minutes.”
The final kudu, which had narrow horns, was one he’d seen the night before and he couldn’t resist going after it, Pettit said.
The concessions allow wildlife management that is far superior to what’s happening in Oregon, and the size of the antelope were astounding, Pettit said.
“They fill that scope up and if you think you don’t have a heart, you know you’ve got one. They’re 5 feet at the shoulders. The eland weighed 1,550 pounds. They’d make two elk. If you can’t get excited about them, you need to quit hunting.”
He said he discussed Cecil the lion, whose killing by an American hunter in Zimbabwe ignited international outrage, with his hosts, who said the real fault in that situation was the professional hunter, Theo Bronkhorst, who has since been arrested on additional charges after allegedly attempting to smuggle 29 sable antelope into South Africa.
Pettit said the second-toughest game animal he hunted was the zebra.
“People say, ‘Why would you shoot a zebra? They’re like a horse.’ Let me tell you, it’s not that easy. They don’t wait around. When they got a smell, one or another would make a sound and they’d all run off. It’s just amazing, how they smell.”
The service on the trip was excellent, he said. They were picked up at the airport and fed royally. Meals were ready when they returned from hunts.
“We had it all to ourselves. We were the only ones there.”
The cost, less than $5,000, was half of what a big bull elk hunt in the States would cost, he said.
“This was on my bucket list. My biggest regret on the whole thing is I should have done it 30 years ago. I could have been there four or five times by now.
“I want to go back if I live long enough. If anybody wants to go, if we get two or three guys, I will go back. They can cater to you if you can’t do the hard-core stuff because you’re not in shape.”