The woods were quiet at first light on May 6 when Ron Bennett of Canastota settled in for what he hoped would be his 30th year in a row of getting a spring gobbler.
Then, a distant gobble... Bennett called and got a gobble in response. Another gobble, this one much closer. Bennett gave a few yelps. Once the long-beard spotted Bennett’s hen decoy, he strutted right in. Bennett took him at 25 yards.
“A text book hunt for sure,” Bennett said.
The tom weighed 21.5 pounds, and had a 10 inch beard and sharp 1-inch spurs. Nice work, Ron, here’s to 31 years!
9-year old Jack Hallquist of Saratoga Springs was fishing for striper bait with his dad two weeks ago at the Troy Dam on the Hudson River. The father/son duo reeled in about 40 herring that day, including a humungous 18-inch blueback specimen as they were getting ready to leave.
“We were blown away!” Said Jack’s dad, Derek Hallquist. “He caught it with a Sabiki rig and luckily had the drag set because this sure would’ve snapped the line.”
That one’s not going to fit in a can.
Send us your fish pics
We’d like to see your catch: the big, the small, and the unexpected. So send us your pics. Don’t forget to provide the name of anyone shown in the photo, their hometown, along with kind of fish, where they caught it, its size and weight (if possible), and the type of bait they used. And throw in some colorful details.
Steve Featherstone covers the outdoors for The Post-Standard, syracuse.com and NYUP.com. Contact him at sfeatherstone@syracuse.com or on Twitter @featheroutdoors. You can also follow along with all of our outdoors content at newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/ or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/upstatenyoutdoors.
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