Hunting Stories

Late Season at Strathburn Station: Cape York Boars

Oct 07, 2026

Twin Elements Podcast · Hunting Stories

Late Season at Strathburn Station: Cape York Boars

I've just got back from a spectacular hunt up at Kayuga Adventures which runs out of Strathburn Station in the heart of Cape York, Queensland. We joined Matty Moore (owner of Kayuga Broadheads and Kayuga Adventures) and Brad Smith (guide) in camp. While its fresh, I wanted to get pen to paper and write all my takeaways down.

Strathburn Station

Rolling the Dice on a Late-Season Hunt

Late Season Country

We hunted between November 8th to 16th. Dates that coincide with the tail end of the season.
Typically Kayuga Adventures operate between August and October each year.
With anything prior to June July being far too wet after a big wet season and anything after October being stifling hot, humid and at risk of being rained out!

Going in that late is a genuine gamble. If you get hit with a serious dump of wet season rainfall, then water saturates the landscape. Suddenly as if in a green house, feed appears everywhere, scattering pigs that had been tightly concentrated around the last few shrinking water sources.
Worse again, enough rain can quickly swell the creeks to the point you can't even drive out.
The upside, because of course theres an upside to get us up here in November.
If the rain holds off, the feral pigs get forced into a handful of predictable, food rich pockets and that's exactly what we found boars throughout the trip.

Cape York Peninsula access roads map showing Strathburn

Located in the heart of Cape York, Queensland - Kayuga Adventures is a bowhunters dream destination!

It's Never Just About the Water

The single biggest lesson Brad and Matty drummed into us echoed “water alone doesn't hold pigs. Food does."
Earlier in the year (June & July) the feral pigs are working green swamp edges, searching for grass, bulbs, roots and lilies. As things dry out, lily bulbs get exposed and mussels concentrate in shrinking freshwater pools. Later still, it's fruit that Matty referred to as “nunga nuts” and various wild plums, wild apples and figs which are an important part of the feral pigs diet.

Plenty of water courses we visited throughout the trip, looked perfect. Almost like an oasis in the middle of this dry country. Yet, after checking them out and walking the edges, they consistently held nothing at all. No tracks, no fresh scat, no sign.
Simply because the water was there, but the food source either had been eaten out or wasn't there yet.

Water alone doesn't hold pigs. food does.

The effects of a harsh dry season showed in the body condition of the feral pigs too. Sows in particular were skeleton thin. Many wouldn’t have exceeded thirty to forty kilos in live weight.
On the other hand, boars, especially the younger ones were still carrying a bit more meat and muscle even this late in the dry.

Making Shots Count

Breaking Down + A Destruction Test

Early on in the trip it became very apparent that the combination of knowing anatomy, executing shot placement and confidence in gear selection would be integral to success on these Cape York boars.
I was running the 250 spine HD shafts by day six archery. Up front my broadhead of choice is the Kayuga pilot cut in 175 gun with bleeders. A truly devastating broadhead with those extra bleeders which serve as razors to extend the cutting diameter and open the initial wound channel. This combo flys hard out of my eight pound Hoyt Carbon rx9 Ultra.

Leaving camp on the first morning i wasted little time shooting a few rounds down the 3D archery range. Aiming for the spot, executing some clean reps before sharpening the broadheads and hitting the road, headed for our first waterhole.

Before the hunt could get underway, the adventure started!
Car troubles left us scrambling to put out some flames and get gear out of the firing line.
Fortunately, we pulled up on a bare patch of sandy road and whilst the transmission had issues, the sand prevented any of the flames from escaping the surrounding dry countryside.

A quick message out of the Garmin in Reach ensured we had help on the way and wouldn’t be stranded for too long.
These SOS safety devices with built in superb functions and messaging off an iPhone are absolutely essential in our opinion when it comes to remote hunting.
Throw in a tourniquet, snake bandage and water purification tablets and you can get out of most binds you find yourself in.

Whilst waiting for Mick, the mechanic to arrive with a second Suzuki, I made the most of the time to do a destruction test on my arrow and broadhead setup.
before sending an arrow through a critter such as a hog, I thought to test it out on a solid ironbark just off the track.
At twenty meters the arrow and broadhead slammed into the tree. Burying up to the insert/ outsert system. We had to crank out the chainsaw and retrieve the broadhead thanks to a bit of precision work from Matty, yet soon enough the arrow was retrieved.
As we had assumed, on inspection, the broadhead was a good as new, simply needing a touch up on a file before shooting into a feral pig. The arrow and all of its components spun true and would fly perfect when next needed.
After the shenanigans, the second car arrived, we shuffled some gear and the adventure resumed!

The Target Boar & Practise Sow

We could have nearly walked the couple of kilometers to the next water, although being able to drive saved us plenty of time, but also afforded us to come in with the wind in our face and spook little while doing so. The drive also meant that we could spend more time walking the best country closest to the last remaining water.

immediately, we saw pigs and just as quickly, we had been winded.
First by a solid top end boar, the second by a mob of fifty odd pigs bedded in a green spring and some shady trees.
Cape Tor bowhunting is as much about reading the wind as it is praying for it to remain consistent.

Wind up here is its own kind of chaos. Strathburn station, sits almost dead centre of Cape York, far north Queensland. As a result, the trade winds drop right off late in the season. If you can imagine, you don’t really get the strong easterlies or the strong westerlies from either side of the cape, instead you get this muffled, inconsistent wind as if it escaped out of a tumble drier and hadn’t orientated itself.
We’d regularly see completely different wind directions at dams only a couple of kilometres apart. Sometimes swirling enough directly overhead that a wind app would show it spinning in place. Add in the worst leaf dump Brad and Matty had seen in years (a byproduct of a couple of really good growing seasons) and you get country that's nearly impossible to move through quietly.

When we spotted the next mob of feral pigs i was committed to get in quick and reduce the likelihood of the wind switching on us.
At fifty odd meters, I hadn’t seen a boar, yet committed to closing the gap to within thirty and taking any of the pig which presented the right shot angle.
At this point, after so much travel, shooting at 3D pigs, performing a destruction test on that tree, I wanted to get some confidence on the real thing.
Unfortunately for the biggest sow in the mob, at twenty five yards i drew back, settled the pin and rattled an arrow through the hollow hog.
When she stood, you could truly see how flimsy this sow and the rest of the scattering mob were.
It was evident now, just how harsh this northern landscape can be at the tail end of the dry season.
Too weak to move and succumbing to the razor sharp Kayuga broadhead like battle axe, she expired barely a meter from her bedding site.
A quick confidence boost and good sign of things to come.
Now we had just need to find a husky boar!

Food, Water & Wind

A Lucky Liver Shot

The Boar That Taught Me About Margin of Error

The best lesson of the trip came from my first Cape York boar.
After navigating a long mostly dry creaked, we moved from scattered water hole to the next.
Finally around a bend, we found a boar bedded in sand. The way he lay, his belly was down on the cool sand, his head to the left and legs tucked under him, angled slightly quartering on to our approach.
It was a great spot, only achievable by racking the focus of the binoculars. From where he lay on the far bank, he only became visible through a narrow gap in thick vine and saplings when focus shifted from close to far.
After a steady approach the wind held and I managed to sneak into sub thirty meters.
I picked my mark at the point of his elbow, aimed an inch above it, and released.
My shot was off.
From where I aimed, in reality, I landed an inch high and two inches to the right right.
Quickly, i knew the shot had hit him dead centre mass, (hopefully) through the liver as it definitely was further back than the heart (where I had hoped).
Blood sprayed out immediately, and I was convinced I'd made a clean kill until Brad, watching through a long lens, with a better un obstructed view called it.
A certain liver hit, not heart. he uttered “get another arrow in him.”
The boar fled and I quickly tracked him up out o the creek to where he was losing consciousness.
Surprisingly he had made it to around one hundred metres to where he'd pulled up feeling sorry for himself, and a second shot through the top of the heart put him down in twenty yards.

Bedded boars simply don't offer the same forgiveness standing ones do, and treating them with that same casual margin is exactly how animals get lost.

The real takeaway here isn't the recovery and impressive blood trail of the Kayuga pilot cut which made retrieval possible. It’s what missing my mark by a couple inches taught me about the difficulty of bedded shot angles specifically.

On a standing, broadside animal, being an inch or two out in any direction still generally puts you in the lungs ( or at worst liver) a forgiving margin.
Whereas on a bedded animal at an angle, with brush dictating exactly where you can and can’t thread an arrow, that same inch or two out is the difference between liver and heart, or worse, between the thoracic and abdominal cavity, or a shot landing in the chest cavity, versus a shot that due to sharper than anticipated angle, skims off the outside without any penetration into the vitals.

The Bedded Boar

The fix, going forward:

Glass a bedded pig thoroughly before ever drawing, work out precisely how much of him is buried in the bed versus visible. Then calculate and consider anatomy. Next, be sure to pick an actual point of aim. This includes on the pig such as a spec of mud, tuft of hair, etc. Alos factoring in part of the landscape such as a patch of sand, a stem of grass, where a leaf sits at the right distance.
Rather than aiming vaguely at "the pig" when most of him is obscured in his bed.

A common mistake we see and experience ourselves is halving the visible portion of a partially buried animal. Then, aiming at the middle of that.
this is a trick where our eyes deceive our logical assessment of the animal.
Because we can only see whats above the bed, or the wallow or the sandy bank, we forget about the portion of pig sitting below this feature. As a result, if were aiming for the middle of the top half of a big, the shot typically lands high, above the chest cavity entirely and more likely to be a spine shot or non fatal shot placement. One requires a quick follow up shot, the other most commonly results in a long tracking job and lost animal.

A Shot In The 10 Ring

A Last Drink Ambush

Taking everything you’ve just read into the next hunt.
We set off for another tight creek.
With intel from the day before when we saw a boar cross the remote track in front of us.
Rather than pursue him, we watched where he was feeding and observed where he headed.
Brad picked it. Being an experienced guide up here he knew where the closest water was.
We marked it on maps and decided to return during the heat of the day, hoping to find him when he was bedded and the wind more predictable.

Parking some ways off the water, we closed in wind in our face.
After one kilometre of little sign except for a few dingo tracks in the sand, we finally found some fresh beds.
With nothing in them, we spied the water ahead.
This little pool was the first stretch we encountered.
With midday heat in the low thirties, it was a shock to see an empty wallow and nothing laying in the water.
As we closed into around thirty meters of the edges, a whistle came from above the bank and Brad signalled that a boar approached.
With steep banks on either side, by the time I laid eyes on the boar we were face to face!
He came in hot, walking straight into the water up to the level of his brisket.
At only twenty odd meters now, I could hear every sip of the water that this thirsty, old boar took.

There’s just something about watching an arrow in flight.
All the practice, the repetition, the tiny adjustments, then watching it disappear into the ten ring.
Pure satisfaction.
Thats talking about a target.
Now, imagine the feeling when you shoot the heart out of an old tusky Cape York boar!

After a few minutes the boar had his fill and had cooled enough. As he signalled to leave and turn for the game trail leading up the bank, I slowly came to full draw and settled the pin.
As these old cape York hogs seem to do, he walked slow. Potentially due to the lack of muscle on these pigs at this time of year, their gait is staggered and drawn out.
As his feet left the water the shot broke and the arrow slammed him through both shoulders.

I knew as soon as the arrow passed through him, that the boar was dead on his feet.
He barely made it twenty yards and toppled over. The blood trail was horrific.
Red claret lined all the leaves on either side of the boars escape route. At the end of the trail lay a solid Cape York boar and a fitting reminder that the decision to be patient often works out. We played the game as dictated by the far north Queensland rule book. Hunt the water and food sources, play the wind and take the shots given to you.

Leaking Engine Oil!

A Feast & Fading Light

One of the more satisfying moments came after deciding to visit a known carcass. It was a decomposing feral cow and in this heat and humidity it only took a few days for the meat to ripen and attract feral pigs.
From the car we could hear the commotion as feral pigs picked precious food from the frame.
We arrived right as the evening feeding bell rung and watched as a dingo moved off the carcass. You commonly see the dingoes waiting in line for their opportunity to feed.
Both pigs and dingoes will get their fill and often bed within close proximity of the carcass so they can revisit it once the temperatures cool.
At the carcass sows and suckers literally picked bones clean. Tugging at meat, tearing tendons and chewing on rib bones much the same as a hungry hound would!
As the shadows lengthened and the horizon began to lose light, a black boar started making his way in. He had a bee line on the carcass. The other pigs squealing and squabbling acted as an attractant and he knew exactly where to walk in and throw his weight around.
upon his arrival, the rest of the mob moved off and gave him so room to feed.
Unfortunately, the way he came in, he walked to the feast and sat on the far side, facing dead on towards us. No shot angle available.
It got darker and darker and the boar failed to shift.
At eighteen to twenty metres, with other pigs within close proximity and the crunchy leaf litter on the ground, there wasn’t room to move forwards and create anew shot angle.
instead when the rest of the mob came back in to feed, it was that competition which cause the boar to shape up slightly and present a slightly more broadside angle.
Now, the next challenge. So much time had passed that there was barely enough light to shoot.
Plus, the boar being jet black in colour had no mud or markings to help pick out any extra detail. Now at full draw, rather than fight to find my single pin and exactly where it sat on the animal I genuinely couldn't make out clearly, I used my multi-pin sight's horizontal spread to silhouette him. Using this tactic, rather than focus on my twenty meter pin which disappeared into his mid section, I held my thirty metre pin against the ground beneath his body to get the height right, then shifted it two inches forward onto the centre of his front leg.
Effectively aiming up his leg line at brisket height, in near-blackness, using the pins as a ruler rather than trying to actually see him.
Once I was confident in my estimations, I squeezed the shot and watched the white fletchings disappear into the boar, right through the vitals. He covered five metres and went down after the arrow took out the top of the heart.

The Carcass Boar Sequence

Note: Being able to perform this sort of shot is only possible when you practise the way i practise.
Having the option archery 4 s sight is such a blessing.
For those that don’t know, or aren’t aware, the 4s sight effectively acts as a 3 pin fixed sight and has one extra floating single pin.
With this setup i choose to have a fixed 20, 30 and 40 meter pin.
Then the ability to move my single pin and dial that to whatever specific distance I need in any given situation.
By shooting my single pin at “30 meters” when the actual distance is twenty meters, I know exactly how many9 inches higher my bow shoots.
Say its four inches at twenty meters with my thirty meter pin, I know that if I’m ever caught with a situation where an animals stops at twenty and i have my pins set to twenty, then i only need to pick a spot 4 inches lover than the heart.
Having this flexibility is only valuable if you practise these shots.
They’re more difficult than one might think, but as seen in this instance, by using the 30 meter pin and knowing that it would shoot four inches higher, by placing it on the belly of the boar, in line with its front leg, the arrow hit it perfectly, one third of the way up its body, through the heart.

Kayuga Adventures

I couldn’t think of a better hunt that epitomises an Australian outback adventure.
We were seeing five to eight boars most days so its a target rich environment.
The crew of guides are knowledgable and enthusiastic which makes for a great week in camp.
If you've ever thought about getting up there, this is genuinely the window.
Whatever your experience level, there's a lot to learn from Brad and Matty.
Topics such as gear, animal behaviour, what works and doesn't, these blokes know Cape York, its critters and incredible scenery.

Check Them Out Here

Strathburn Boars