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November 06, 2013
Offer expires on 11/11/13 at midnight.
June 27, 2013 8 Comments
YETI Coolers specialize in manufacturing the best ice chest known to man. Built to last with rugged durability. These bad boys are certified grizzly proof and will keep ice longer than any other cooler on the market. Perfect for all outdoor activities, including boating, hunting, fishing, tailgating, camping and rafting.
Here is your chance to win a custom Atlantic Drift Yeti Roadie20 full of great AD products. Retail value of over $400. We are giving away this prize package on our Facebook page. The giveaway is going on now at facebook.com/atlanticdrift and all you have to do is share this contest with your friends to enter. You can also rack up 14 additional entires to improve your chance of winning. We will select the winner via Random.org and make the announcement on Monday, July 8th at 12pm. This is one you don't want to miss, so head over there now before it's too late.
Good Luck!
December 04, 2012 1 Comment
We want to see where & how you are putting your Atlantic Drift koozie to use. Email us your koozie pictures to info@atlantic-drift.com and we will post them on our Facebook page. The picture with the most "likes" at the end of this month will be the winner of a free hat or visor of their choice. Keep those photos coming and be sure to like your favorite ones to help us chose the winner.
October 22, 2012 1 Comment
“There have been some kings around, but we haven’t connected with them yet this fall.” Patterson said. “Fishermen on the piers are catching them, and so are fishermen at Yaupon and McGlammery Reefs, so it is just a matter of time until we find a school that is feeding. In the meantime, kayak fishermen are excited to have the opportunity to catch one of these big red drum.”
Patterson said some boaters have been catching the big drum on live-bait king mackerel rigs as they slow-troll live menhaden around the reef. He said the flounder have been biting, too, and many flounder fishermen are also connecting with the big fish using 5- to 6-inch menhaden and mullet fished on Carolina rigs on the bottom.
Patterson said the rig he’s been fishing is basically a heavy duty Carolina rig with a circle hook. He said perfect-sized have been running down the beach just beyond the breakers, and it’s easy to catch a bunch before launching the kayaks.
Patterson said the mullet are also a good size to catch large Spanish mackerel, and kayak fishermen have had plenty of success doing just that. For Spanish, they’re use a live-bait king mackerel scaled down to a size appropriate for the bait and fish.
October 12, 2012 16 Comments
by Jonathan Miles - Oct/Nov 2011
A boy acquires a profound appreciation for the hunt
Click for the recipe: Sliced Dove Breasts on Cornbread Crostini
The greatest meal of my life involved a Triscuit.
At the age of eleven, you see, I came into possession of a .177-caliber Crosman air rifle. The rifle shot mushroom-shaped lead pellets, and if you pumped the rifle a dozen times or so, to the point that a pneumatic/mechanical explosion felt dangerously imminent, it shot them pretty hard. One afternoon, bored with plinking cans, I took lazy, purposeless aim at a mourning dove perched upon a branch in the next-door neighbor’s yard. Perhaps I meant to scare it, to startle it skyward, I don’t know. In any case I felt certain I couldn’t hit it.
I hit it. The way the dove dropped, in an awful flutter of wings, mirrored the state of my insides; my heart collapsed in free-fall panic. As a boy of the suburbs, I’d never killed anything before, or even considered it; my imaginary targets had always been Nazi infantrymen. I leaped the concrete-block wall dividing our yard from the neighbor’s, only obliquely aware, at that moment, of how severely forbidden was this terrain. (The neighbor was a middle-aged mumbler, schizophrenic if you trusted neighborhood rumor, who was fond of sunbathing nude on the roof.) No matter: I dashed across his backyard to where the fallen dove was flailing in the shade. Desperate to end its misery, I pumped the rifle to its airy maximum and shot the dove point-blank in the head. The stillness that followed didn’t console me. My eyes soaked, I shot it again, and then again, sobbing, and then again and again until I was finally out of pellets.
I could have left it, or buried it. But something inside me, with a wise and moral voice like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s, said I had to eat it. Wasting it, said the voice, would only compound the sin. As a latchkey kid, as we were called in those days, I’d become proficient at making Triscuit pizzas in the broiler, to feed myself after school, but this recipe, cadged from the Triscuit box, marked the beginning and end of my cooking chops. With a pocketknife, then, I cut the dove open, not knowing what to look for but finding a small wedge of purple breast meat from which I carved a few mangled slices. I heaped them atop some Triscuits and watched them sizzle under the red electric coil, my tear-smeared face staring back at me from the oven glass. And then, alone at the breakfast counter, I ate them.
I don’t wish to overstate the moment, but the greater risk, it seems to me, lies in understatement. With each sniffling, tentative bite came an ever more profound understanding of the natural world, an epiphanic realization of what it meant to eat meat, to eat flesh, to eat animals, of the way death begets life, the way death feeds and nurtures life, of the cruel and beautiful order under which we all operate, boy and dove alike. If design, as the teleological argument goes, is how God makes His presence known, then here at the breakfast counter was God, speaking to me from a Triscuit pulpit. And though I wept throughout that meal, in hot shame and terror, something else occurred to me as well, a sensation at once irreconcilable but undeniable: The dove breast, seared from the broiler, unadorned with even salt and pepper, was…delicious. Here was pain, at seeing the world’s dark heart revealed, but here, too, was a new and riveting pleasure, a taste unlike anything I’d encountered before.
For almost thirty years now I’ve been trying to re-create that meal. With doves, of course, shot over sunflower and millet fields in Mississippi and Georgia, but with ducks too, lifted gently from the mouths of wet Labrador retrievers in the Arkansas Delta and elsewhere, and with wild turkeys, and with squirrels, and with a musky-flavored wild boar I shot in the Tennessee mountains, and plenty of deer as well: all in the service of a single memory, a singular truth. Just recently I read about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s vow to only eat the meat of animals he’s killed himself, which he’s been doing on a California farm. This is commendable, if a bit unwieldy (he can expect some awkwardness while traveling), and may just be the next logical frontier in the locavore and ethical-eating movements that have been blessedly spreading throughout the nation. For hunters, however, this is no frontier. It’s something every hunter comes to understand, whether by shooting his or her first squirrel under grandfatherly tutelage (as my eight-year-old son plans to do this fall, with his Pop), or accidentally shooting a dove over a concrete wall: that only by killing, by enacting (or at least observing) the transformation of animal to meat, can we own up to our appetites with anything like honesty. “Man is a fugitive from Nature,” wrote the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and, as we all know, the fugitive’s life is necessarily constructed upon lies. Meat is not an abstract protein; that’s the lie, subconscious but toxic all the same. It’s the lie we abet every time we toss out a cellophane-wrapped package of meat that went neglected in the refrigerator’s way-back, stung by the waste of money if stung at all. For the thoughtful hunter there is no such blitheness. Grandiose though it may sound, the hunter afield is stalking more than game; he’s stalking truth.
But why wild truth? This is where pleasure bleeds in, admittedly, but also something deeper. It’s become fashionable of late for restaurateurs to extol the provenance of the meat on their menus—what farm the pig came from, who fed it—in order to tell a story of how that pork shank made its way onto your plate. These have become the dinnertime equivalent of bedtime stories, designed to lull you into virtuous enjoyment. And while they’re a necessary corrective after decades of industrial storylessness, these stories are inevitably about the farmer, not the animal. What we hear about the animal is what was or wasn’t done to it. With wild animals, it’s different. The story belongs to the animal, except for the ending, when the story turns briefly to the hunter. At a deer-hunting camp I used to frequent near Crystal Springs, Mississippi, we used to perform something we called “the autopsy.” The idea was to determine just how the deer had died—where the bullet had hit, what precisely it had done—but, out in that low-ceilinged tin shed, gathered around a pendent whitetail carcass, our whiskey breath visible in the autumn-chilled air, we’d learn a whole lot about its life, too: what it’d been eating, what the scars on its hide revealed, how that hairline fracture on its hind leg was what had prevented it from springing away fast enough to beat a clumsy shooter. This is not to suggest we lounged about the deer camp telling stories about our deer in the sacred manner of movie Indians. Of course not; we told dirty jokes like everyone else. But it is to say that the deer were present, not as mere meat, commodities, or God forbid trophies, but as wild and sentient creatures whose lives we had deigned to take—hungrily, but respectfully.
The flavor of game, like its story, belongs to the animal, not to any farmer, and not to the hunter (unless he botched the field dressing or some such). It’s contingent on its diet, its age, its sex, its life, and it’s owing to this that the flavors can vary so widely, so maddeningly. Yet there’s an elemental magic to those free-ranging and often untamable flavors, a direct link to the natural chaos that lies within that grand design I happened upon as a weepy eleven-year-old boy. For a cook, this can be challenging: It took me months to devise methods of making that ancient Tennessee boar edible, and despite valiant and repeated efforts I have yet to charm guests with a bite of Canada goose. Yet this is somehow part of the allure, too. Into the kitchen with game comes wildness, with its infinite degrees of diversity and complexity, and its infinite mine of stories. This is why the oxymoronic farm-raised game is such a wan replica of the genuine article: Its life and death are predetermined, its story not its own. “Poetry,” said the French critic Denis Diderot, “must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.” As a Triscuit once taught me, the same goes for eating.
October 09, 2012
We are excited to announce our most recent partnership with the NCKFA and the 3rd Annual Oak Island Kayak Fishing Tournament. This tournament is being held on October 13th in Oak Island, NC and we will be a part of the prize winnings, silent auction, & swag bags for every angler. There are many different divisions in this exciting new tournament including King Mackerel, Redfish, Sea Trout, Flounder, and many more. You can view all the details/information at www.nckfa.com/tournaments.html Good luck to all the anglers this year! Tight lines.
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September 19, 2012
We recently had the great opportunity to send a few hats/visors down to the good ol' boys of Duck Dynasty. They seemed to love our products and spent the day making custom duck calls in Atlantic Drift gear. Here is a few good shots of Godwin and Martin wearing the Atlantic Drift camo hat and visor. Be sure to check out the season premier of Duck Dynasty Season 2 on 10/10/12 on A&E.
August 23, 2012
New custom Atlantic Drift needlepoint key fobs are now available. Check them out in four different designs, the Mallard, Sportfisher, Mahi, and the Marlin. You can purchase yours today in our new shop under the accessory section.