Hooters Shooters trip to Charleville, Central West, Queensland
Jan 07: Two members of Team Abbey Archery Hooter Shooters went on a hunting trip 50 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of Charleville in central western Queensland, which is 750 kms (450 mls) west of the state capital, Brisbane. (If you are using Internet Explorer or Firefox as your browser, hover your cursor over each image to read the photo captions) 
Members, John McKay and Brian "Hooter" Westerhout set out for the 10 hour drive at 3.00am on Friday to arrive in the 40 plus degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) heat at the hunting property. 
After unpacking the F250 truck into the shearers quarters, we packed our hunting gear to set out for the river to start searching for wild boars.
After walking the river bank for a couple of hours in the extreme heat, we headed for the mountain range in the east. We made it to the truck - well almost back to the truck - before the thunder storm dumped a load on us.
The road soon turned from dust into slushy mud and we had to revert to low 4 x 4 drive for hours just to get back to our camp. It is hard to believe that in the morning there was a dusty, dry creek bed but this deluge of rain turned this creek bed into a swift running river of about 46cm or 18 inches deep, lapping at the floorboards of the F250 and that on the next day, the creek had vanished and was a dusty dry creek again. Incredibly that next morning, the roads were dust again. Where we were in almost impassable mud the afternoon before, in the morning it was dusty with very strange porous soil.
The mountain range turned out to be good to us. Even though the heat was unbearable at times, the game we saw made up for it, with John bagging a couple of good billy goats, one being a huge goat but unfortunately its horns had broken off.
As a result, John nicknamed Brian the goat herder. The storm came again and flooded the creek crossing we need to traverse to get back to our camp.
John was shooting his Martin Cougar, wearing Game Hunter 3D camo while Hooter relied on his Jennings CK3.4R and ASAT gear, which he found to be cooler and had more of a camouflage effect than John's gear.
All in all, we had a good trip which could have been better if there had been no storms, because the game scattered with plenty of water lying on the ground and pigs and goats did not need to travel to the river or dams to find water. We will return, in winter.
