Uhunt Mag Information

• Posted By : BRISTLE UP
• Posted On : Jan 12, 2020
• Comments : 1
• Views : 2699
• Likes : 13
• Category : DEER HUNTING » PRODUCT REVIEWS
• Description : TESTING OUT THE MOROKA 30 camouflage

Overview

• WRITTEN BY CLARK MCGHIE
  
  “Not bloody likely,” I said with a fair bit of gusto, “Homey don’t play dat”, “No way, Jose.”
  My mate Justin had been spruiking about how good this new range of camo gear was from a bloke called Rob Fickling in Victoria. “Moroka 30” was the name of the gear and although I had seen it in the magazines, I had not given it much thought at the time. Like a scarred up old stag coming in to drink at a dangerous waterhole, I slowly reached out to touch the dreaded fabric of this garment which looked all the world like, LYCRA...!! One touch of the silky fabric of this bush-shirt made me recoil in fear like I had heard a twig snap behind me, much to the riotous amusement of all present. “I don’t do lycra, no way you will see me in a pair of bike pants, it’s just not gonna happen!”
  Well, quite a few years ago now, and although it is hard to admit I was wrong, I find myself sitting here on a ridge glassing a big stag edging out of cover in my now all-time favorite, the Moroka 30 Vapourtech Thermal in GDR Bushfire Blaze pattern. Now before you jump to conclusions and say old Clarky boy has lost it and joined forces with Bob Brown, let’s get a few things straight. The incredible fabric in this shirt is known as Vapourtech A.B.L (not lycra!) which stands for Advanced Base Layer and is made out of high-quality polyester with a VERY tiny percentage of lycra to exacting standards especially for Rob and Moroka 30. 
  
  One of the amazing and unique properties of this fabric is its permanent moisture wicking technology. Don’t ask me how it’s done but it’s there, and it’s permanent, meaning it doesn’t wash out and boy does it keep off the sweat- should you work it up. Rob has put a huge amount of effort, time and money into developing not just this shirt but also into his entire range of gear. This shirt is the Raglan style with long sleeves and thumb holes cleverly added to give you that extra coverage over the back of your hands. It’s not there for the added sleeve length, and don’t worry about that either as the Moroka 30 cut has plenty in that department. One of the main reasons I relented and gave this shirt a try out was due to the terrible tragedies involving hunters both here and in NZ which occurred just a few weeks prior to seeing the Bushfire Blaze camo pattern and shirt for the first time.
  
  
  
  The striking splash of color across the shoulders of this shirt is one of the first things you notice, and that is exactly what it is meant to do. This camo pattern and shirt is designed to be functional, but also it is designed to be seen by other hunters. My first hunt with this shirt was a good old hard slog straight up into the valley it was named after, into the mighty Moroka river catchment. Heavy rain had fallen until a few days before we arrived down from Queensland and for someone straight out of the Northern chital country, it was cold as charity. 
  
  My mates Gary “Crash” Courtney-Byrne and Justin Pianta, both being “Mexicans,” didn’t seem to mind but I prepared myself for agony. To my surprise, once I had a thermal on under the GDR Bushshirt, I felt as if my temperature had been put into neutral, I certainly wasn’t hot, but I wasn’t cold either. Once I hefted my pack and rifle and made the top of the first rise, I was feeling very comfortable, and this was a big relief for a Queenslander. 
  
  
  
  What was very comforting to know as I watched seven other hunters arrive below us and make their way up into the same system, was that I was now a lot more visible to a human eye than if I was wearing conventional camo. Justin was working his way around the valley about 400m above me, just under some massive rock faces at around the 900m mark and I could clearly see his Remington Blaze Orange cap every time he stepped into a clearing. He reported back to me that I stood out like the proverbial on a skinny dog, which I took as a great compliment. As I had purchased a lot of Moroka 30 gear from Rob, this was going to end up as an extensive test of a lot of his products which I will cover in another article. Arriving home, it wasn’t long before I was back up North chasing scrub bulls, pigs and dingoes. 
  
  This was going to be another quite different test for this bush-shirt as the temperature was now in the high 20’s, we had some serious hills to climb and a completely different vegetation type. Even though I was still hunting on the Great Dividing Range, after which the camouflage pattern on this shirt was named, over such a vast difference it would be hard for one common style to do everything One of my first “jobs” was to film one of my hunters smashing some big boars in a patch of a terrible pest weed known as “Parkensania.” This stuff makes our other horrible pest weed Lantana look mild and even beats the dreaded Blackberry in the thorn department. While hunting the Sambar I was forced to push hard through some big patches of blackberry’s, and I thought it would have been the end of my new bush-shirt as the material is so light and thin. To my surprise, even though we got snagged up many times, not one single thread was pulled and not one hole appeared. 
  
  
  
  This tough but lightweight material stretches if needed and conforms close to your body in a very different way to what Lycra does, honest. Even though I always carry a good pair of secateurs/pruners with me so that I can quietly cut my way through just about anything, I was sure the “Parky” up in my favorite pig swamp would rip my shirt and blow my dollars for sure. I chose to wear initially, the second shirt I got from Rob, which is the Vapourtech Micro Zip Neck in the GDR Gully camouflage style a straight camo without the Bushfire Blaze across the shoulders. This shirt also features the same permanent moisture wicking technology, but it is manufactured from a far lighter weight fabric which is designed for mild and warm weather stalking. 
  
  This pretty much sums up most of Australia’s hunting when you think about it. My aim was to watch to see if there was any noticeable difference in the reactions of other species of animals when wearing either of the two shirts. My thought was that although deer are known to be “color blind” when it comes to the blaze, there may be a completely different response from other species that Kurt and I hunt and guide on. No better way to test these shirts than in the field during our busiest time of the season. Not only did this fabric come through with flying colors and not even a pulled thread, when I looked at some of our footage, later on, but the camo pattern and shading was also excellent in this type of vegetation. 
  
  The GDR pattern is quite open, with distinct branch patterns and not a lot of big leaves in the design, which is exactly what this terrain is like. Rob took many hundreds of photos of a lot of different areas along the Great Dividing Range as he was developing the GDR Camo patterns and analyzed carefully what an animal actually sees when they look for signs of danger in an approaching object amongst the trees and understorey of the great divide. The resulting patterns provide outstanding breakup and color matching and truly are perfect for our country. It feels great to hunt the Aussie bush, in an Aussie made hunting garment, in an Aussie camo pattern. Makes sense really!