2015 NAFA Meet - Hutchinson, Kansas

[Paul Mascuch]

I enjoyed seeing old friends at the meet this year. The earlier timing of the meet seemed to help attendance, but the earlier date hurt me as my bird was not quite ready and the ducks had not really showed up in Kansas yet. One day we checked 100 ponds and didn't see a duck.

I didn't catch anything at the meet, but I did get a 4 point buck Saturday on the way back home. Unfortunately I did it while driving Jim Frazier's truck. We hit the deer 6 miles short of our destination for the night in Evanston, Wyoming. My wife had to drive my truck from Boise and retrieve us. Jim's truck was not driveable and is still in Wyoming.



Paul

[Tasha55403]

Ouch!!! That's gotta hurt Paul
In general, it was a good meet. The weather kinda sucked and the game wasn't great, but the people were wonderful and that's the really important part Everyone seemed to like our hoods and we sold a fair amount which was really, really nice.

Personally, it was probably at the bottom of my list of favorite meets. Nothing to do with the meet itself though. Our clutch went out about 200 miles from Hutchinson. Brian used some magic (and a whole lotta luck) to get us to the meet hotel somehow, but we were without a vehicle all week which really limited us. Then I came down with a cold Tuesday night to make it even better.

Brian built us a really cool dog box setup in the truck which was absolutely fantastic except for the 2 days the truck was in the shop and we had nowhere to put 9 dogs. We had a chain gang set up which worked really slick, but we had to borrow a big kennel from a friend and Brian had to walk over to the Tractor Supply to buy a few smaller kennels so we could bring the dogs in the hotel room overnight since the tow truck was 3 hours late and they didn't get it fixed on Thursday like it was supposed to So, I spent Thursday and Friday watching 9 dogs on a chain gang instead of going hawking.

I only got out hawking twice all week and slips were tough to get. We did get a few slips though and on the second trip out (with Michael Beran's crew) we managed to get 2 bunnies in the bag. It was great getting to see one of our pups from the last litter working! Zoidberg/Hermann is doing a fantastic job and he's only 6 months old