Finally got a garmin.... WOW!!!
Posted: Sun Jul 25, 2010 12:40 am
I got my garmin and 2 collars and all I can say is HOLY SH*T BALLS..... This thing is AWESOME!!!! It's like a whole different world. I turned out on a rig and tracked my dogs turn for turn while setting on a stump. They went 257 yards from me (at that point) and set down to treeing or so the garmin said. I couldn't hear them because the wind was pretty strong so I turned my tracker on and was getting a sporatic tree beep. I had my doubts about it but, I went anyways(not like it was that far to begin with). I started hearing them and they were treeing hard. I got to the tree and there was a nice big ole boar bear. I praised up the dogs and the bear looked comfy so I started digging in my pack for my camera when the dogs went ballistic. He came down and left out in a hurry once the ivory started to stinging him. I kept tracking and following them. I wanted to see how good this thing was. I was at about 2300 feet in elevation when I stopped and could track them all the way down in the hollows to about 1500 feet on my side. Once they hit the bottom that "deep" and started up I would pick them back up. This went on until they hit about a .75 miles. (I logged it down on a card) Once they got out that far it went down to around 1800 feet and that was both sides of the hollow. When they got to 1.25 miles I was only picking them up when they hit 2000 feet or topping over the ridges. The last signal was at 3.25 miles when they topped over a ridge. I started walking towards them then. I guess I should have followed closer but, there was a deep (1200ft) wide hollow between them and myself and I wouldn't have been able to "test" it from down there. They treed it 3 more times according to the track log on the collars. I finally caught them off the last tree 13 hours later. If I'm reading the info on the map source right they covered 14.8 miles at an average of 2 mph when I turned their collars off when I leashed them up. I lost two dogs with beep beeps on when they split, I guess they fell behind and got lost or got on another bear anyways I picked them up 2 days later. The Garmin is awesome and I'm saving my pennies to outfit all my dogs.