Member Justin Sliva Shares Land Academy Success Stories (LA 1016)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Welcome to The Land Academy Show. Something a little bit different this Wednesday. We've got Justin Sliva with us just coming off of some bear hunting. I want to hear all about bear hunting, raising little kids, and then ... Because I'm sure, in this order ...
Jill DeWit: I got one.
Steven Butala: What's going on with the deals that you're doing?
Jill DeWit: Oh, and the latest car purchase.
Justin Sliva: Okay. Bear hunting. Well, we went to an amazing place in northern Ontario, Armistice Outfitters. Great group of guys. They have a concession for 20 miles of all the bear in that area. So 11 hunters went up. We were the third week of ... Hunter season's three weeks long. Our first night to hunt, and eight of the 11 ... Sorry. Six of the nine hunters that went out got a bear, ranging from the size of 80 pounds to 325 pounds.
Jill DeWit: Wow.
Justin Sliva: Yeah. Fast forward, the next day I go back out in the morning, sit up in a tree, because I wasn't one of those.
Jill DeWit: I was going to say [inaudible 00:01:00]
Justin Sliva: Wasn't one of those, so I go back out to my stand where we'd seen a lot of bear, or they'd seen bear on camera. Spent about eight-and-a-half hours in a stand. Don't see a bear. Then the next day, I go out for two different stints, four hours and four hours. Don't see a bear. See how this going, right?
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Are they hard to miss?
Justin Sliva: No. They're big and black. They like to growl at you and sniff, and stuff. Day three goes by. Seven hours in a stand. No bear. So I'm getting a little frustrated. Day four comes up. I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to this one stand." We have camera time that he's been there at this time. Slide up there. 15 minutes after I told myself, "I'm going to leave, because I haven't seen a bear yet," there's black ... At this time of year, there's black flies and mosquitoes up there, so they're just swarming nonstop. If you know what a black fly is, it looks like a little flea, but bigger.
Jill DeWit: Whoa. [crosstalk 00:02:06]
Justin Sliva: I'm in a full gillie suit up in the stand. I see like something kind of just shoot by my left eye, so I'm like, "Oh, okay." So I look down and I'm kind of back between some trees, back in a cut, and all of the sudden, this big, brown, cinnamon, black bear just like ... He looks at me, I look at him. My gun's sitting across this way. I'm like, "This is the bear legends are made of." If you get this bear on your first bear, you never hunt bear again. You just brag about it. So he looks for me, I look at him. We have like this moment of clarity of like, "I'm here to take you." He's like, "Ah, crap. I wasn't supposed to come here today, but I accidentally popped in, and you're here. This isn't good." I hit the safety on my gun and go to point, and he just dove into the bushes, and I couldn't get a clean shot.
Jill DeWit: Oh, man.
Justin Sliva: So 11 hunters went on our hunt that week. 10 of them got bears. One of us didn't. Yeah. So expensive camping trip. I went with my biological father, my brother-in-law, and my biological father's hunting buddies. He's a world-class hunter. He's hunted all over the world. So I got to spend some time with him, got to know him. But I look at the pictures of the trip they went on and the trip I went on. They were totally different. I sat in a damn stand getting rained on the entire time while they were doing world-class fishing. I mean, they fished for northern pike and walleye.