One for The Wall

I logged on this time and couldn’t quite believe my luck when it said ‘Upper Glaisnock’. I made a phone call immediately to my hunting mate Pete. Planning started straight away and over the coming months, Pete and I trained our arses off. We were both relatively fit before but by the time we were ready to catch our water taxi on the 29th March, we considered ourselves ‘Fiordland fit’.

To be honest, I felt a sense of achievement before I had even set foot in the block. I knew this was a seriously good opportunity and it needed dedication so at the beginning of summer I had started running 100km a week – almost all hill work – sometimes up the Bluff Hill five times a night. After Christmas I stepped it up to running before and after work and running trails when I wasn’t hunting in the weekends. Eventually I was running 20-30km and up to 1500m altitude every opportunity I got; the worse the conditions, the better. At that stage it really was more about training for mental strength than it was about the fitness. Pete was going hard out as well and there was a bit of rivalry going on that just pushed us further – it was awesome.

We planned to head in on Waitangi weekend (without rifles) for a night at the rock bivvy and a few nights of fly camping. The weather was pretty rubbish but we were committed anyway. We shot up the Glaisnock to the rock bivvy for the night, stashed a couple of luxuries, and hunted back to the lake again the following day. The weather had really turned and although it was disappointing not to get a night on the tops, we still had a lot of animal encounters and got a good bearing on times and landmarks etc.

I met up with Pete on 28th March, just in time to get along to the briefing. We managed to catch up with the other