Bobcats, White Owls and Airboats

Based on the title, my Jeopardy answer: "what are two things I'm not willing to shoot at." Doug, Jonah and I braved the savage Lake Poinsett and fought the northerly flow Saturday morning looking to bag a few pigs during this month’s small game season. It was forecasted to be unfavorable weather that afternoon so we got an early start. As chilly as it seemed to be, when I walked out of the door around 0430 I thought it would be a miserable day in the swamp. The day ended up being beautiful, as you can see from the video: 15 mph southwest wind, air temp in the 50's. They dropped me off at the shelter where Dorian Airboat Canal dumps into the Middle River which is about 2 miles from where they hunted southwest of me. On my side of the swamp things were pretty status quo, just the usual sound of pigs beating up on each other before they bed down for the day. I made an attempt to get to them but they were just too far into the thicket for me to catch up with them. Doug and Jonah were lucky enough to watch a bobcat walk in front of them but unfortunately that's the majority of what they had for action that morning. Later in the morning we met over by one of the public camping sites called Pontoon Camp and we decided to walk through a few hammocks to try our hand at squirrel harvesting. As we drudged through the second or third dense patch of palmettos, something odd caught our eyes. It was a white owl flying away through the trees. It was pretty neat to see. We heard a crash in the top of one of the cabbage palms close to us and something resembling a half-eaten rat plopped on the ground next to Jonah. Anyways, that’s it from this last weekend. I'd like to get out and try to spend the day out on Middle River next weekend, spending the early hours chasing the recently elusive black spots and then changing gears and fishing for specs in the later part of the morning. John D., aka the great white hunter, say they're really stacking up on the hard turns of the river right now. He was out on Tuesday and picked up his limit. Maybe I'll take the fly rod? Whatever the weekend might bring, I'll try to keep everyone informed.