Had high hopes for this weekend the farmer finally got the soybeans planted which always yields a nice crop of hogs. With all the rain he was almost a full month behind normal planting time and I guess this threw the hogs off not a single hog came into the fields Thursday-Friday. So I packed my stuff and headed south to be with the family for Easter.
With the cold front that came through I had high hopes for moving hogs, even though Mrs TLM gave me a curfew for Easter. The forecast called for rain starting around 3am and that was well after my established curfew. With my hopes still high I arrived at the ranch and opened the first gate smelling rain in the air. Before I could even make it to the first good spot it was raining hard so I just parked on a high spot where I could scan a large area with the thermal.
I did not take long before I made out a hot blob out in the field below me, I tried confirming what it was with my pvs-14, 3x magnifier and laser illuminator but the rain and fog was bouncing back way to much IR light. I grabbed the REPR turned on the 100mm Zeus and could see a large hog rooting out there. Luck was with me and the rain let up from a downpour so I moved fast and got to about 80-100 yards from the boar.
At that range the boar was fully visible but the detail from the 100mm was not coming through. Normally you can see the hairs but on this boar it was just a dim outline. Thinking it was the mist and rain I switched through the different pallets to see if they would make him stand out better and ended up choosing the RAIN pallet. He took a 165gr SST to the neck and went straight down doing the curly shuffle for a few seconds.
Turns out the reason I could not get any detail was the weeds were from knee to waist high in this field so the distortion was from looking through 80-100 yards of wet vegetation.
