CO OTC & OTC with caps on sale at 9 am July 21st

[mtnmutt]

In case you wish a CO bear tag or want your OTC in your hands now...

Over-the-counter with caps licenses (bear and elk) are licenses that are limited in number and only available first-come, first-served starting at 9am? MDT? o?n July 21.

For Dan\'s question on the Deer forum...
Unlimited over-the-counter licenses are licenses that are unlimited in number and available in a range of units and seasons. There are unlimited over- the-counter licenses for cow and either-sex ar??chery elk, bull elk in the 2nd and 3rd rifle seasons, either-sex elk in the plains, either-sex archery pronghorn, and doe and e?ither-sex whitetail deer. These licenses are restricted to certain units and manners of take. For more information, please see the maps off the Maps?? page or the 2015 big gam?e brochure (pages 30, 34-37 and 49). These licenses are listed in the online system without a hunt code or by asking for the specific OTC license by phone or in person.? OTC whitetail deer licenses are only available? at CPW offices.?

 

[iccyman001]

.

For Dan\'s question on the Deer forum...
Unlimited over-the-counter licenses are licenses that are unlimited in number and available in a range of units and seasons. There are unlimited over- the-counter licenses for cow and either-sex ar??chery elk, bull elk in the 2nd and 3rd rifle seasons, either-sex elk in the plains, either-sex archery pronghorn, and doe and e?ither-sex whitetail deer. These licenses are restricted to certain units and manners of take. For more information, please see the maps off the Maps?? page or the 2015 big gam?e brochure (pages 30, 34-37 and 49). These licenses are listed in the online system without a hunt code or by asking for the specific OTC license by phone or in person.? OTC whitetail deer licenses are only available? at CPW offices.?

Thank you so much for this! I am reading those pages as we speak :upthumb:

 

[Jaquomo]

Make sure you have your online form filled out and are ready to hit \"send\" at exactly 9:00. Many units and species sell out in a few minutes.

Last year the server crashed at 9:01 and didn\'t come back up until 9:10. They supposedly have that problem fixed now.

 

[Baby Huey]

Anyone else having problems? Looks like there are two links for deer when trying to purchase a license at Step 2. One should be for elk, as elk license options show up when one is chosen. I keep getting an error message when I try to purchase the resident archery antlerless elk license...

 

[Jaquomo]

They\'re having website problems again. Happens every year. Looks like they\'ve bumped the time up to 10 a.m.

Since this happens so frequently, you\'d think the company they contract with would get it figured out. As in, \"We\'re going to have a whole bunch of traffic at a certain time, so let\'s expand our ports and server\".

 

[iccyman001]

Maybe JF can chime in more on this as a techy guy, but this happens on many state game and fish sites.
They just cannot keep up with the site influx.

I am sure they could probably buy better media to cover the influx, but we all know how their budgets run.....
I doubt they spend a couple extra thousand dollars (or more) to make the site better for a day.

:downthumb:


It took me 2 hours to check what I drew for NM this year.

 

[Jaquomo]

CO contracts it out to an outside vendor based in MO because they supposedly have the resources to handle the traffic. Every year It\'s something new that goes wrong. Last year they forgot to include NRs in the deer draw and had to do it over....

 

[iccyman001]

CO contracts it out to an outside vendor based in MO because they supposedly have the resources to handle the traffic. Every year It\'s something new that goes wrong. Last year they forgot to include NRs in the deer draw and had to do it over....

Wow. That\'s kind of a big mess up hahah.

 

[mtnmutt]

They\'re having website problems again. Happens every year. Looks like they\'ve bumped the time up to 10 a.m.

Since this happens so frequently, you\'d think the company they contract with would get it figured out. As in, \"We\'re going to have a whole bunch of traffic at a certain time, so let\'s expand our ports and server\".

Load testing. Why o why does upper management not allow load testing before go live? I fight this at my company for any new systems before going into production. There are so many automated off the shelf products to do load testing. Unfortunately, more ports and servers doesn\'t always help. Memory leaks & non terminating threads (processes) will bring down servers. I have seen the memory leaks and non terminating threads while load testing new software. Open source code has bugs and software engineers need to account for that faulty software.

Testing, Testing , Testing. You can\'t trust a software engineer to code perfectly.

 

[Jaquomo]

Good insight, Patricia.

One thing that might help would be to stagger licenses/species by day. Deer today, elk tomorrow, bear Thursday, etc... Not try to absorb all the traffic for every license request from all over the country all at one specific time.

 

[Jaquomo]

Site went up at exactly noon. I got one of the few bear licenses for my unit about 30 seconds later..

 

[iccyman001]

Site went up at exactly noon. I got one of the few bear licenses for my unit about 30 seconds later..

Awesome! Congrats

 

[mtnmutt]

There are hundreds of bear tags still available. I never knew there were so many bear tags.

 

[cnelk]

There was a big increase in bear tag allocations this year.

 

[Jaquomo]

Depends on the unit. Mine only had 54 tags spread over five units for over a thousand bowhunters. But overall the CPW wants some bears killed.

 

[Lark Bunting]

Do you guys eat the bear meat? Donate it and make bear skin rugs? I\'ve never had bear meat and from what I\'ve been told it\'s not that great. I\'d like to try it sometime to judge for myself as a bear tag in the pocket could be a sure fire way to avoid seeing any while out in the woods with my kid. :mrgreen:

 

[Jaquomo]

Fall bear in CO is maybe my very favorite wild game meat. Can\'t speak for anywhere else because I\'ve never killed a bear anywhere else. Trim the fat off first, and it\'s wonderful. We once had a bunch of non-hunting friends over for a bbq and served bear kabobs with pineapple, peppers, onions. Everyone raved about it. Then we told them it was bear. Some accused us of lying. Everyone went back for seconds before we told them though...

Even the bears we\'ve shot right before dark and recovered the next morning were great. Sweet, texture like pork.

As far as license sales go - the CPW is now only going to sell leftover licenses in person or by phone. Like buying concert tickets in the \'80s. Best of luck to anyone who tries to do that. Last time people were lined up outside offices at 2:00 a.m., cops were called out to keep the peace, and most of the leftovers were sold out within the first 15 minutes.

 

[atfrith]

That\'s a bummer. I was hoping to pick up a couple leftover licenses, guess i\'ll be joining the herds. :shock:

Are certain places better to go than others? No way i\'ll be going down to the headquarters as that will be a cluster, more than likely i\'ll end up at the local walmart....

 

[cnelk]

The best way not having to deal with the leftover sales fiasco is to use the Leftover Draw Option on your application.
You get 4 choices on the first draw and if unsuccessful you get more chances on the 2nd leftover draw.

No way will I stand in line again, or sleep on the ground out front of the COW office waiting for a leftover tag.
I got that T shirt.

 

[atfrith]

Yeah I need to figure out a better system next year. I got my usual OTC archery license along with a deer tag in the draw, but every year I try and meet up with my out of state uncles for a rifle hunt. Both of them are in different states and they often times don\'t make their decision on which season (2nd or 3rd) they\'re going to hunt until the very last minute.

It\'s never been a problem for me because regardless of which one they choose, there has always been leftover cow tags for each season, so many of them in fact that it\'s never a rush. The only thing different this year is I\'d like to pick up a doe deer tag and there aren\'t normally a ton of them left over...