Today we were joined by friends from Mendip Hunt Sabs and Plymouth & West Devon Hunt Sabs to sab the South Devon Hunt at a meet down the road from Cold East Cross.
They too were joined by hunt staff and riders from other hunts, including Eggesford’s Jason Marles. The weather did an excellent job of sabbing them.
In thick fog and sideways rain huntsman Guy Landau set out north from the meet, riding along the road for a few miles “to see what might be possible”. He’d made the usual announcement at the meet that “trails have been laid”. Strange that, considering he didn’t seem to have much of a plan as to where he was going to hunt!
Landau found a low-ground gap in the fog west of Top Tor and cast hounds into the scrub. Two of our foot teams encircled the hounds and just kept sending them back to him, thwarting his attempts to pick up on scent. To be fair, the ground was so waterlogged, there wasn’t much scent around. Landau completely failed to shake sabs, particularly our tenacious runners who weren’t deterred by waist-deep bog. Some of the hounds were so hungry, they occasionally strayed from the pack to chew on the carcasses of dead sheep scattered all across this part of the moor.
After failing to pick up on anything north of Cold East Cross, the hunt headed towards Rushlade Common and from there across towards Halsanger, where Landau lost most of the pack in thick fog.
After spending about an hour gathering them, he gave up and headed back to the meet to pack up at 2.30. A nice early finish for us, and we don’t think the support had much of a view of anything all day. Riders also looked pretty bedraggled before they’d even started hunting.
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