bladeracer wrote:Archie wrote:I've never been to that one personally, but supposedly this one was in high demand for the normal bookings so they put it on a ballot system instead between end of Feb and June to make it a bit fairer. I'm assuming the demand was because it has a lot of deer.
Do you mean that when you book a hunt in a state forest in NSW you can actually be knocked back?
I thought it was just a matter of having your name on a list before you go out.
Do you find out when you make the booking whether you're allowed to go?
Yeah, you do. The way it works is (and this is the normal system, not the balloted system - I have no idea how the ballot works) - so for starters you need to have your NSW DPI R Licence. You log onto their website, there is a list of forests and it tells you how many spots are free for each forest for a range of dates.
So for example, you and a mate might be looking to book a hunt for a specific forest for next weekend. You need to give them at least one clear day in advance of your start date so you couldn't book it on the Friday. You log on with your details and the website will tell you that for Saturday there are 5 spots free in that forest and Sunday there are 4. You and your mate need to two spots, so you book it and you're done. Website gives you a written permission letter which you need to print out and carry with you. So yeah, you know you're allowed to go, all sorted. Happy days. If, on the other hand, when you log on, there are no spots free for that forest for that date, then you're out of luck and you can't book it and have to pick another one.
My guess - and as I say, never looked into Maragle so it's only a guess - is that it was often busy and people couldn't get bookings. So they moved to a ballot.
I honestly don't know how they figure out the number of hunters allowed at one time in any given forest, but I would assume it's just based on the size of the forest. I hunted a very large forest late last year that had 20+ spots available; the forest was huge but given the amount of space inside that forest you were actually allowed to hunt in it would have been pretty crowded if 20 people had taken up the spots. But as near as I could tell I was the only person who actually had made a booking for the three days I was there, and I didn't see any people at all (or any living thing but wombats and kangaroos either but that was probably my fault).