The Best Piece of Gear I Ever Bought

Woolrich Sweater

It is hard to deny that I am an impulsive buyer, but once in a while that pays off.

In January 2003 I attended a corporate innovation summit at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa, and apart from a lot of snow and very long and a treacherous drive back home, a bad development program that never got anywhere, the one positive thing that came out of that trip was a new sweater.

There was an Orvis shop at the hotel, and they had a very attractive Woolrich 100% wool sweater for sale. The price was an outrageous one hundred and twenty dollars, but just after checking out I bit the bullet and bought the brownish-green or greenish-brown piece of clothing and took it home with me.

Almost ten years later, this sweater, that I am wearing as I write this words, is probably the best and most useful piece of gear that I ever bought. I used it to hunt in Michigan, North Dakota, Arkansas, Ontario, South Africa and Uruguay. It is absolute quiet, warm even when it is wet, so well cut that it can be used in social occasions (although it is starting to show signs of age and some damage from brush and brambles).

Along with my Swiss Army Knife (about which I will talk in the future), I don’t think that there is a piece of gear that I ever used more than my Woolrich sweater. The only problem with it is that it is no longer available.

As Gene Hill once mentioned in one of his books, anytime we find a very special piece of gear; be it a hunting jacket, a pair of boots, or a sweater, and we fall in love with it, it goes out of catalog and we will never again be able to find a replacement.

I recently bought another sweater from Orvis; it is a nice Beretta green wool with windshear lining. While it may complement my old Woolrich, it will not replace it.

P.S.: The shotgun in the picture is a little Beretta side-by-side 28 gauge that my mother bought to my father as a wedding gift. This is the gun that my son used to shoot his first bird on the day of my father’s funeral. I tell this story on the very first posting of this blog “Last Bird, First Bird”.

How I Got Started in Wing Shooting

Photo by Aluísio

 

I was raised on a farm in Northern São Paulo state in Brazil and a day in 1976 we moved to town so I could attend school since there were no school buses and the sixteen miles of dirt roads were in many cases impassable during heavy rains.

We continued to come a lot to the farm, for weekends and vacations, but as the years went by, the house built in 1954 started to show signs of age, especially the old wooden windows and particularly the one in the “boys’ bedroom”, and no matter how you tried to close it, there was always some crevice or opening left.

So, it became very common for us to find bats in our room, and that was always a great time to train anti-aircraft artillery. We first closed the door so the grown-ups would not be aware of the intruder, then stuck a pillow into the gap of the window, removed our shoes and started to throw them at the bat.

Needless to say that since shoes do not have proximity fuses or the pattern capabilities of good shotgun shells it took a lot of “rounds” to bring the flying rats down, and after many such battles the ceiling got a lot of permanent marks from the mud and cow dung in our boots.

Next came a CBC 310 (8 mm rim fire) single shot shotgun. Although I shot mostly birds, I used the little gun almost as a carbine, as I stalked my prey as close as I could to make sure that the small charge of No. 12 shot hit its target (the most covered of which was the big white-winged pigeons or Asa Brancas (Paragioenas picazuro)), and that probably would not qualify as wing shooting.

If I remember correctly the first bird that I ever shot on the wing was a quero-quero (Vanellus chilensis) during a July vacation in our farm in Goiás state, central Brazil. As I walked along a two-track in a field the bird started to fly over, probably trying to protect its nest, and when it was floating on the wing I shot it with a 28 gauge side-by-side shotgun. I examined it and found that the quero-quero has spurs on its wings, and then left it behind. The next day I only found some feathers, and felt less bad for having provided a meal for some poor scavenger.

Not until after I got married I shot a couple rounds of trap and some friends allowed me to use their reloading presses to make some proper shells, plastics hulls and wads and 11/8 ounces (32 grams) of 7½ shot. If I remember one thing in particular is that those shells kicked much harder than the calves we had in the corral.

Things really changes when we relocated to Michigan and by accident or fortune we bought our home less than five miles from the Southern Michigan Gun Club outdoors range, and I started shooting skeet and buying new shotguns on a rather regular basis.

From my humble battles with bats, I have now hunted birds on the wing in Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Michigan, Indiana, North Dakota and Arkansas, and currently I regularly shoot clay pigeons in Michigan and Italy, but I must say that almost nothing that flies compares to the big white-winged pigeons that come just before sunset to roost in the giant bamboos of a certain farm in a poor country where all hunting is outlawed.

Even with all the opportunities that I currently have, another day I was almost homesick when my mother told me that my nephews had their first encounters with bats at the farm house. Poor kids, their shoes probably do not fly as well or hit as hard as my brother’s orthopedic boots.

Short Traveling Notes

Piazza Solferino, Torino

I am back in Europe, hunting new business, but I am never very far away from real hunting.

I brought two books in the trip. Kuki Gallman’s “Sognavo L’Africa” (I Dreamed of Africa), which I finished yesterday, and Bob Munger’s “Trailing a Bear”, that describes his many trips and adventures with Fred Bear. I already had watched the movie “I Dreamed of Africa” and read the book in English, but I picked the Italian version on a street market some weeks ago in order to help me improve my Italian grammar and vocabulary.

On Thursday we traveled from Baden-Baden to Frankfurt by car and besides the ever presented elevated hunting stands (in a small field I counted five!), I saw a beautiful colorful rooster pheasant at the corner of a plowed field, and not ten minutes later a saw a Roe buck with nice antlers walking across a field parallel to the tree line.

On Friday, coming back from Tczew to the Gdansk airport I spotted a larger deer, probably a red stag hind still wearing its grey winter coat not too far from the highway.

Finally, today I had lunch at the Cantina Barbaroux in Torino. In their menu they say that this is longest continuously operated cantina in Torino, established in 1902. The main dish was “arrosto di cinghiale con polenta” (roasted wild boar with polenta), and it was good enough to lick the plate, or almost. I used some bread to savor the last drop of sauce and juice.

The Most Flexible Gun

Remington 870 Express

One of the first things that I learned when I started my engineering degree is that we should not become a specialist that could only solve one type of problem, nor be a generalist that could not solve any problem well. In order to be successful we need to achieve a certain balance, be the expert in some areas, but have good level of knowledge over a broader field of our activities.

In many ways, this rational also applies to most fields of human activities. A Formula 1 car is only good to race inside a track, and if you try to use one to take your groceries home you may face some major issues. On the other hand, an average mid-size sedan is a much more flexible vehicle and will better meet the needs of a greater number of people.

Guns are no different and some firearms are so specialized that they only perform well in certain situations and are in many cases impractical for almost any other use. Examples of ultra specialized guns are free pistols, which are single shot .22 LR open sighted handguns with a extremely light trigger and no safety, a dedicated American Trap single shot shotgun with a release trigger (and no safety), or a large bore (e.g. .450” and up) double barrel express rifle. While each of these guns excel in their specialized application, like the Formula 1 car, they are not much good for almost any other use.

But there are some guns that are much more utilitarian, and although they may not be the best for certain specialized or eccentric needs, they are will perform a large number of shores exceedingly well.

I hunt birds as well as large game, enjoy “clay pigeon” shooting a lot, like to shoot for fun, and believe that it is a good insurance policy to keep a firearm for home defense, although I hope that I will never need it for the last purpose.

I also have many different guns that I can choose for each different shooting discipline or hunting condition that I am likely to face, but many times a question comes to me: what if, by some terrible force, I had to live with only one gun? Which one should I choose?

The traditional answer for this question generally takes us to central Europe, or more specifically Germany and Austria, where combination guns have been popular for as long as one can remember. These guns may have two, three or even four barrels, and as a rule combine at least one smooth bore and one rifled barrel, thus allowing the hunter to hunt large or small game, and shoot game on the wing or at several hundred meters (remember, these are European guns and they only understand the metric system).

While these combination guns are certainly flexible, they do have some drawbacks. First they are expensive, in general very expensive. Second, they tend to be a bit heavy and cumbersome. Third, they tend to be mechanically intricate, or in simple words they follow the old German axiom, why make things simpler if you can make then complicated and they still work.

Finally, and due to the third point, too many things can go wrong with complicated systems, especially operator error. I have read and heard too many stories about pushing the wrong button, sliding the wrong lever, or pulling the wrong trigger and setting the wrong barrel off. The typical results are shooting a pheasant with a 9,3x74R mm bullet, or a jaguar or eland with a load or bird shot, which is at least a bit annoying.

My approach for a very flexible gun is not particularly high tech, and many would consider it almost mundane. It is very affordable or almost inexpensive, very handy and extremely simple.

As you already guessed from the picture above, I choose my 12 gauge Remington 870 as my most flexible gun. Besides the inherited flexibility of shotguns (just pick the right ammunition and they will get the job done), the 870 pump action design and easy to change barrels allow it to perform very well under very different situations.

The short 18½” (470 mm) barrel combined with the five shot capacity and fast pump action provide me with one of the best home defense gun that has even been conceived. The same or similar set-up has been used for police and military work for over a century, and although we will find new “combat shotguns” with a lot more features, the Remington 870 is still the standard against which all others are measured against.

The same short barrel, either loaded with buckshot or Brenneke slugs, makes a wonderful gun to hunt in heavy bush or swamps. You could be after wild boars, deer or even a wounded leopard and not be under gunned.

Then there is the 23” (584 mm) fully rifled cantilever barrel. In my case it is topped with a Nikon ProStaff 2-7x32 scope, and the only ammo I shoot through it is the Lightfield Hybred EXP slugs. I shot deer at over 140 yards with this combination and I believe that it can be pushed a bit farther. The 546 grain 12 gauge projectile with 2,549 ft./lbs of muzzle energy makes this round capable of taking almost any game in the world, the few exceptions being buffalo, rhino, hippo and elephant. Although not ideal, the 870 with its slug barrel could be used as a “battle rifle” or even as mid-range varmint gun.

Next comes the 28” (710 mm) ribbed barrel with screw in choke tubes. This is the barrel that gets the most use, as it is used for small game, upland birds and waterfowl, and skeet, trap, five-stand (Compaq), sporting clays, and any other form of shotgun games. It is also the most flexible of the three barrels that I have, and the one that I would pick, if I was forced to just one barrel, as it can shoot bird or buck shot, slugs and almost any thing that fits inside it.

There are other guns in the market that could be as flexible as the Remington 870, but to my tast, the 870 delivers the best value and handling of all of them.

It is great to have options, buy, sell and trade guns now and then, day dream about new adventures and choose which gun to use for each different activity. On the other hand, it is reassuring to have one good “go to” gun. That most flexible gun that you know will get the job done.