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Quadriplegic woman hunts in Florida

PARKERSBURG – More than six years after a wreck left her paralyzed, a south Parkersburg woman shot a pair of boars on a hunt last month in Florida.

Stacey Fordyce, 27, bagged the boars on a game farm, on a hunting trip with her dad, Jed Fordyce

Fordyce was left a quadriplegic following a 2006 auto accident. She said the accident meant the end of dancing, schooling and her career.

It also affected Fordyce’s family, her parents, sisters and grandparents.

“It changed a lot of people’s lives,” she said. “It was a very big adjustment.”

She also assumed the accident marked the end of hunting with her dad.

Stacey started hunting with her dad when she was young, carrying a gun, a Savage lever-action .243, into the woods as a seventh-grader. A year later she bagged her first buck.

Fordyce said it was important to do anything she had been able to do on her own before the accident. Prior to the accident. she was a Southern Belle and ran track at Parkersburg South High School where she was also homecoming and prom queen.

Getting back into the woods to hunt was a dream.

“I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to do it,” she said.

One of her relatives thought otherwise.

Fordyce credits her cousin, Greg Arthur, for creating a gun mount for her wheelchair. Arthur’s rig allowed Fordyce to pull the trigger via a string looped around her fingers.

She doesn’t have the use of her fingers, but can move her arms, allowing her to pull the trigger.

“He welded a device that my gun mounted to. It got me out there hunting,” Fordyce said. “I was able to kill some deer. Nice deer.”

Less than three years after her accident, Fordyce was back in the woods.

Larry George, her grandfather, recently met Matt Spencer of Roane County who works with Hunters in Christ Kingdom and Final Fate TV show on the HUNT channel on DISH Network. They arranged to bring Fordyce to Ocala, Fla., for a week-long boar hunt at the Two Guys and a Hog game farm..

Before heading down, the Fordyce’s found a mounting device from Be Adaptive Equipment that allows her to shoot by sucking through a straw.

Fordyce and her dad spent several days hunting from a blind at Two Guys and a Hog. She was the first quadrapalegic to hunt the farm.

They set up in a blind in front of a feeder. On the first day, Fordyce shot a 100-pound black pig.

After a day of rest, the pair headed back to the blind. Fordyce was hoping to bag a bigger boar.

“I hadn’t been in the blind 15 minutes when (a group of hogs) came crashing through the woods,” she said.

Fordyce said there were about 20 hogs feeding. She settled on one, but decided to wait, hoping for larger prey.

Five minutes later, she said the big hog she hoped for came to feed.

The hog ate quickly and started moving away from the blind, leaving Fordyce no shot.

She could only watch as the hog continued to walk away. Instead of wandering out of range, Fordyce said the hog stopped and turned quickly, giving her a broadside shot, which she seized.

“It was 15 pounds off the camp record, weighing in at more than 275 pounds,’ she said.

The scale at the camp capped out at 250 pounds and the hog was touching the ground as it tipped the scales, George said

Fordyce is having the hog mounted.

She’s also set her sights on turkey hunting as well as working to use a crossbow.

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