I must apologize for my extended absence, however life can get in the way of even our most important activities. And that is what has happened here. However I am writing today to bring everyone up to date on this site.

First I want to address my last post about our QDMA banquet since I haven’t written anything since then. Basically, everyone had a great time and the event went off pretty well- except for not having a full house. All of the volunteers did a great job of finding sponsors, planning the event, setting up and working it. But like I said, we definitely could have used some more supporters in the seats, and that really hurt our bottom line. However we had anticipated that due to three factors, we might not get the turnout that we were looking for.

The biggest was the state of the economy right now. I don’t think anyone is oblivious to all of the people out of work or the ones that aren’t working as much as they were, causing everyone to tighten their financial belts until things get better. The second factor was that our event was scheduled for the last weekend of the summer when a ton of people who would normally attend where out of town squeezing in some more family time before school started. And the third is that the NWTF Pocitaligo chapter does such an amazing job with their banquet in the Spring, and have done so for quite a few years. They are not only a tough act to follow, but in such a small community as ours, trying to do similar events is tough. There are just only so many people/sportsmen that will attend banquets and/or sponsor, so we are all pulling from the same pool. And in this tough economy in a small community on the last weekend of the summer, that created a tough situation that I am happy to report will be rectified with some of the new plans we have coming up for our branch!

So, like I said, we had a pretty good event; it was just a tough year to do it in. However we did break even, so no problems there. We also did what the Quality Deer Management Association wanted us to do, and that was to promote QDM and the QDMA while bringing more supporters on board our group – and we did both. We also spent over $7500 with local businesses (including Have Gun, Will Sell who supplied all of our firearms and the County Line who provided the dinners), hopefully helping them during this tough time. We also spent over $3000 with national QDMA sponsors. So all in all, not too bad during a tough time. And everyone with the QDMA Salkehatchie Branch wants to thank those that attended.

The only thing that did not work out for our banquet was our newspaper promoting QDM, our branch and our sponsors. We had decided to wait until after the banquet to put the paper out so that we could not only have more time to put out a nice publication, but to also make sure we had the funds to pay for it. And due to only breaking even on our event, we had to postpone the release of our paper because of that cost.

And I hate that we were not able to fulfill our commitment to our sponsors, so I take full responsibility for it. HOWEVER, I intend to make it right, and quickly at that. First I am still looking to publish a QDMA newspaper around late October, even if I have to cover some of the cost myself, when we have the most visiting hunters to read it. Second, I will be promoting all of our local sponsors in a very unique way, and it will be obvious very soon how I am going to do it.

Which brings me to the state of this blog… There are lots of new posts on the horizon and even more big changes coming! So I hope that everyone will understand about my absence (which I will also write more about) and continue to stay with me as I get back up and running. And as always, I want to truly thank those that have been loyal readers as well as the newer ones, both of whom I have run into in town asking when I was going to get back to the business of writing about the great hunting we have here in the lowcountry…

All I can say is check back on Monday!

Jeff

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