The Lakes

Over the past 6 weeks there has been a lot of work underway at Chaplin Bend, including the construction work on the lakes.  This project involved three phases:  raising the dam on the existing lake to expand it to about 2.5 acres; adding a new 1.5 acre lake above the existing lake; and constructing a wetland and the top of the valley to redirect the water that has flowed east out of the valley to the south into the lakes.

Here are some "before" photos.  First, looking down the valley from the very top (The small pond in this photo will be eliminated in the project):  

Then, the view looking back up to the site from which the first photo was made.  The site of the wetland is the weedy area in the valley.

Here's a view from further down the valley.  The water in the middle lake will come just to the foot of the larger tree in this photo.  You can make out the existing lake in the distance.

And here's a view looking back up the valley from about the place where the new dam for the middle lake will be.  The large tree in the distance is the same tree in the previous picture.

Here are a couple of views of the existing dam and lake:

Easy to see in that last photo that the existing dam was pretty poor (no spillway and not much freeboard) and heavily eroded.  Although it didn't leak, it needed to be repaired.   The new dam will be much higher and stronger.  

Here's a brief video from my lake guy documenting the "before."

I'll post more photos of the construction process later.  

Deer

Although I didn't buy Chaplin Bend primarily for deer, we will hunt deer later in the fall when the season arrives.  I've put game cameras out over mineral rocks in several places on the farm in an effort to develop a census of the deer on the property, and I'm happy to say that I'm seeing some very nice bucks over the past few weeks.    Here are a couple of bachelor groups that have wandered into camera range:

And here is a great shot of the largest buck I've seen yet:

The cornfield should be harvested this week, leaving about 3 acres of standing corn in the back corner of the farm.  We'll plan to hunt over that food plot when the season rolls around in a few seasons.

Dove Hunt!

Almost 4 months after planting the dove field in early March, we held the first dove shoot at Chaplin Bend today.  And it was great!  I was joined by son Wes (son David had a wedding today), friends John, Don, and Mike, John's son Ballard, and Don's brother Dave.  Eveyone had a great time.

The field performed fantasticly.  There were many hundreds of doves, with increasing numbers as the day went on.  In fact, the best shooting was from around 4 to 5:30 in the afternoon.  If any of us could shot, we all would have had limits.  As it was, John and Ballard got 14. Wes got 12, Don and Dave got about 10, and I got... fewer.  After hitting my first shot, I couldn't hit anything for several hours.  Finally late in the day I got the hang of it.  

Next year we'll start later--perhaps after a lunch on the cabin porch.  And I think we could have more folks--the way the field lays out we have plenty of room for 10 or 12 shooters. 

Later this week we'll be baking dove pot pies.  I can't wait!