I arrived out to him in the late afternoon. He forgot to tell me he speaks in a funny accent so there was a lot of hitdehodewewewewe and me nodding politely until the universal translator kicked in and I could understand some of the strange words
Straight out the back of the house is a steep rocky path that leads up to the fields and to the top of the mountain. Luckily I had my fleece which i was advised to take because where we were in the lee of the mountain it was lovely but once we got up to the top of it, the wind was, old expression here, not far off from “Blowing a hooley”. And I am one who feels the cold a lot. I have spent a lot of time with different clothes trying to figure out what keeps me warm.
Anyway
We went up on the quads as said to get the lie of the land and for me to get some practice in. The last time I rode one of those I was in Egypt more than a few years ago and we were going on flat sand in top gear and it was as boring as a boring thing could be. Both me and the misses ride bike so following a load of dweebs sent up to sleep.
This was slightly different; this was a “WE’RE GOING UP THERE?” There was loose shale, deep ruts, streams, (I was wearing trainers) boggy marshy bits. Steep inclines, up and downs and bits where you look to one side and you can see the town in the valley straight below, oh and the quad was leaning that way as well. A long, long way below so don’t cock it up ffs.
All in all, everything you would want if you had to go off and pay for it. Damn I was having fun, who cared about shooting?But off shooting we went. Definitely the way to spot was with a lamp. You simply couldn’t ride and spot with the thermal or NV and there was such a large amount of land to cover it would have taken too long stoping and scanning. mind you a bloody bright torch is essential as we were scanning long distances. must remember my torch next time as well.
The surprising thing was the amount of exposed rock. This coupled with the amount of sheep made it really difficult to scan and spot. You were looking at about 50% of your view showing exposed rock with residual heat from the day showing as a heat source. That combined with well insulated sheep would have made spotting with the thermal on the high ground difficult or more time consuming. As most of my shooting is on level grass covered ground this came as a bit of a surprise and did higlight some difficulties. Certainly lower down on some of the fields with more soil the thermal was easier to use as we witnessed with something in a field n it's own about 500 yards away. Next time I will take some pictures so we can show how everything shows up.
My normal way of foxing/bunnying is to walk into a field and scan for life. Here there is so much heat that you need to take time to look at each source and discard it and unless a fox was moving in the open it would take a lot of time and even then easy to misse it.
So in this instance the way to work would be to lamp with the quad, (or to lamp whilst riding the quad, before any of you smartarses pick me up on my grammar) then once you have spotted your quarry you could use the thermal to track or squeak (read that as, try to squeak) the fox in. As a lot of shots are long distance, 200 plus, then you need good kit. In this instance I would not have been confident of taking a 200 plus yard shot as I do not believe;
(a)My optics are good enough,
(b) I am good enough (I just do not have enough experience of longer range shooting) So I will be doing some testing and rethinking my 223 scope.
If the fox was unwilling to come in then you could possibly get closer to it as they seem to like settling up in the bracken, BUT, you would then have to scale Mt Everest to get back to the quad. Wouldn’t take long before you were knackered mind you it wouldn’t take you long to get fit there either I can tell you.
I couldn’t see out beyond, I think, about 140 yards using the Night master. The battery had died on my firefly (My fault and I forgot the spare) so I will be going back out into the field and putting the fox targets out at 50 yard intervals to see the effective range using the nightmaster, The Firefly and the N1000. Now normally 140 yards is no problem as everything I shoot tends to be less than that but at the end of the day if you need extra legs then you need extralegs
Definitely a fantastic fun night out. Managed to get to bed by 6.30 am. But we are agreed there is some more testing to be done with the thermal in the colder weather to see if the rocks are less bright. As an aside the thermal behaved itself battery wise. It appears that an 8 to 10 hour charge is exactly what the doctor ordered. See my bit about “Battery’s, the mystery deepens”.
Oh and his missus cooks a mean steak
Gave me plenty of things to think about with my setup.
