Five Gifts for Over $100

Perhaps I've been too much of a cheapskate. Every year I do a list of the top five gifts under either $30 or $20 on this blog. If consumer spending really does drive the American economy (which I don't fully buy but that's beside the point) then I'm not doing my fair share. In that spirit, here are my top five Christmas gifts for hunters and fishermen for over $100.

1. The Brinkman charcoal smoker. I received one of these as a gift a few years ago and have gotten someone else's money's worth many times over.

Here's the neat thing about having a smoker: it widens your fishing options. If you live near the coast and catch Spanish mackerel then you probably have a low opinion of them as food once they've been out of the water for more than a few hours. But if you brine the filets overnight and then put them on the smoker then they are delicious. Any oily fish is, really. Eat it as-is, or put it on toast with butter, sliced onion and capers, or use it in potato salad. Ditto carp (which is good many different ways), gizzard shad and every other fish that I have ever tried smoking.

The Brinkman is just large enough to smoke all sorts of other things as well. Whole venison hindquarters stack in easily if you take off the last few inches of bone. I smoked an entire wild ham for Thanksgiving last month by removing the top wire rack to make room. I'll be experimenting with squirrels on it next week. Everything tastes better smoked.


2. 'Blizzard Stalker Pro' hunting boots, by Rocky. Another gift from a few years ago, these things have kept my feet extremely warm in outdoor situations where I would have welcomed the excuse to turn around and go inside. But no, my feet were perfectly warm twenty degrees below freezing so I sat there and kept hunting through the bad weather. Stupid damned boots...

3. Lets just go nuts and throw something really expensive on here. For close to $600 you can make a new hunter (or an experienced one) extremely happy by buying her or him this Leupold VX-3 rifle scope. If you worry about getting the right thing, trust me that this is it.

I personally do not own this exact model, but I have a less expensive model by Leupold on my primary deer rifle and I can vouch for the quality. The difference between this and a $100 scope won't be noticed at the shooting range. The difference will become clear when its drizzling and when the sun is almost down and the light is so low that when you look through a cheap scope all you see is foggy blackness, while the Leupold will still let you see the deer or pig or sasquatch or whatever you are hunting and you manage to make the shot after all.

4. Its not like I would ever consider spending more than $20 on myself for anything except a tank of gas or a heart transplant. But if I wasn't such a cheap bastard then I would buy myself a set of shooting sticks or a tripod along the lines of this Bog Gear shooting tripod. As many shooting rests do, this thing can double as a camera tripod. Personally, I tend to normally use cheap $20 monopods because I know I'm just going to keep losing them in the woods. But my shooting would probably be better at longer ranges if I had one of these.

5. If you are terrified that your daughter or husband is going to ruin their hearing at the shooting range with their new hobby then you can do something about the problem this Christmas. Buy them a set of these neat electronic hearing protectors by Peltor.

This type of hearing protector electronically filters out loud sounds that could damage hearing, while amplifying quieter sounds. That means that the user doesn't have to remove their hearing protection at the range in order to understand what the person next to them is trying to tell them (which is probably, 'keep your ear muffs on because this next shot is gonna burst your eardrums!).

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. Why am I including a picture of fresh rainbow trout? Because trout taste really good when you smoke them on your Brinkman smoker. And its dark while I'm writing this and I can't take a good photo of my smoker or my boots or rifle scope right now. So enjoy the barely relevant picture of the trout, ok?]