Three more members have been added to the growing NorthCarolinaSportsman.com moderation team tasked with continuing the site’s reputation as one of the best places to discuss the state’s hunting and fishing opportunities.
Joining the team are Jeff Smith (known on the forum as Creek07), Joey Murphy (aka Gobblintom) and long-time NorthCarolinaSportsman.com Field Reporter Wes Lewis.
Smith, Murpy and Lewis join Jeff Huggins (aka Viperx4), the first of the moderators to be brought aboard.
The 39-year-old Smith has been hanging around NorthCarolinaSportsman.com reports forum for the past two years, sharing photos and stories from his time afield.
“I am a lifelong outdoorsman,” Smith said. “I began hunting deer and turkeys as a teenager. Since then I have pretty much become a fanatic.”
While he spent a lot of time bass fishing a local lake in his native town of Florence, S.C., it was two years after moving to Kannapolis in 1995 when he became determined to understand as much as possible about deer.
“Quality deer management is something I have worked on year after year,” Smith said. “I try to measure my success as a hunter in terms of stewardship and memories. Given that scale, I have been pretty successful.”
But he has an even higher standard against which he measures everything he does.
“Above all, I try to live my life as a man of God, which in my case means being the best husband and father I can be,” said Smith, who also spends time teaching young hunters and friends to love the outdoors.
When hunting season is over, Smith turns to gardening and fishing for trout, flounder, stripers and anything offshore.
Murphy has been a NorthCarolinaSportsman.com user since October 2009 who came to North Carolina via West Virginia, where he left in 1988 looking for a job outside the coal mines.
He has worked for the past 17 years as a maintenance mechanic at one of the few remaining furniture factories in the Unites States, and takes every opportunity to get into the outdoors.
“I can never remember not going fishing in my life,” he said. “My father took his own life when I was 9 years old, but by then I pretty much had the fishing thing figured out and still went with my Paw-Paw every chance I got.”
He graduated to squirrel hunting at 13 “because Paw-Paw said that it would keep me from doing what other teen-agers did.”
Those childhood experiences have grown into an adult passion.
“I love to hunt anything in season, but turkey hunting is my passion, I guess because you’ve got to reverse nature to be successful,” Murphy said. “Just going outdoors every chance I get is what drives me: Could be hunting, trapping, fishing or camping.”
Lewis has served as a site field reporter for the past three years, along with contributing articles to North Carolina Sportsman magazine. The 47-year-old lives in Sherrills Ford, right on the shores of Lake Norman.
He has been a tournament bass angler for more than 25 years, a passion that began at an early age when he caught his first rainbow trout with his father in Washington’s Snake River.
“I caught it, and my dad thought I should let it go.” Lewis remembered. “I really wanted to eat my first fish, so my dad let me carry it home in a brown paper lunch bag, and he cleaned it, cooked it and I ate it. I think I was five or so.”
But he has settled into the Tarheel bass-fishing opportunities.
“I really like the bass fishing North Carolina offers,” Lewis states. “There are so many different types of waters here…it just makes you a better angler.”
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