The Wichita Eagle has a nice feature story about Dave Beeler, a part-time bow maker who recently fashioned an “American Thunder” bow (see photo) to honor members of the U.S. military.
The red, white and blue bow features a medallion of a bald eagle inlaid into one side of the riser, with a dogtag inlaid into the other. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Ralph Ireland might be 88 years old, but he thinks about new things.
Ireland, a fisherman from Mankato, Minn., was having a hard time launching his boat. He couldn’t keep his footing on the trailer’s wet rails.
He invented a pair of remedies: The Slide Step and the Swing Step, zinc-plated steel running boards that bolt to the rails. The steps have a non-skid coating to provide dry, sure footing.
Read Ireland’s full story in the Mankato Free Press. Check out his inventions here.
Congratulations to Clarksburg’s Bryan Layfield, one of the nation’s up-and-coming young pistol shooters.
Layfield was a force at the recent NRA National Pistol Championships at Camp Perry, Ohio. He won the junior national championship, and along the way racked up high-junior scores in nine categories of the .22-caliber and .45-caliber disciplines.
The 18-year-old recently graduated from Liberty High. And get this — he only started shooting a year and a half ago!
Here’s a link to a story I wrote about him back in February.
Congratulations and continued success to Wirt County’s Bob Harkness, who this Thursday will begin competition in the million-dollar Forrest Wood Cup in Pittsburgh.
Harkness earned his slot in the big-time event in April by capturing the FLW National Championship at Bull Shoals Lake, Ark.
My good friend Chris Lawrence at West Virginia MetroNews has the full story.
Attention, anglers: Keep your fishing tackle under lock and key. Theft is more widespread than you probably think.
Case in point: The Missouri State Water Patrol recently arrested a man alleged to have received “tens of thousands of dollars’ worth” of stolen fishing gear (see photo).
The man, Keith Clark of Peculiar, Mo., has been charged with receiving stolen goods. Police hint, however, that other charges might be forthcoming.
Investigators say the equipment was stolen between April 4 and July 10 at three Missouri reservoirs — Lake of the Ozarks, Truman Reservoir and Table Rock Lake.
People on both sides of the political aisle have questioned Sarah Palin’s political bona fides, but there’s no doubt about her devotion to hunting.
Palin used the platform of her final day as Alaska’s governor to send a message to anti-hunting forces.
“You’re going to see anti-hunting, anti-Second Amendment circuses from Hollywood,” she said. “They use Alaska as a fund-raising tool for their anti-Second Amendment causes. Hollywood needs to know: ‘We eat, therefore we hunt.’”
As she left office 18 months before her governorship officially expired, the former vice-presidential candidate said she and her husband would probably “do a little moose hunting.”
I’d been a fly fisherman for more than 30 years, but I’d never cast more than a handful of split-bamboo rods before last weekend.
At the first annual Mountaineer Bamboo Rod Gathering, I got to cast a bunch of them — and what was really cool was that almost all of them were built in West Virginia.
Doctors say Vann Streety is lucky to be alive.
Shot seven times, the Florida conservation officer survived on will and grit. His story, in Florida Today, makes compelling reading.
Today’s sportsmen tend to overcomplicate things.
That’s why Bill Winke’s recent article in Petersen’s Bowhunting magazine is such a breath of fresh air. Winke’s treatise on “Bulletproof Bowhunting” is a primer on how to avoid the zillions of things that tend to go wrong when the buck of a lifetime comes within range.
Winke’s philosophy of “keep it simple, stupid” should be emblazoned on the limbs of every bow, and his article should be on every archer’s reading list.
What ever happened to the good old honor system?
In Winnipeg, Manitoba, it’s gone the way of the dinosaur. When folks there offer cash prizes in their fishing contests, they use lie-detector tests to make sure the winners haven’t cheated.
Lorne Huff, an ex-police officer, administers the tests. So far, he hasn’t discovered any violations serious enough to force an angler to forfeit any prize money — or be charged with felony fraud.
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