Post Season Recap

There is a brief window in our yearly hunting schedule where the lessons of the season just past are still fresh. I need to make record of them before my head fills with holiday glurge. My apologies for not doing this sooner. I just started a new day job, and it has been consuming everything.

We celebrated our 16th season of Deer Camp. Everybody got a big buck. Everybody got a doe for the freezer. By weight and by antler, we bagged the new #2 and #4 bucks. Supercore’s buck had a bigger rack but was about 5 lbs lighter than mine.

This was SuperCore’s first season with the ATV. I have purposely eschewed these vehicles in the past for reasons I have stated. However, SuperCore’s bypass surgery left him unable to get back and forth to the blind. Something needed to be done. My first impressions were that his bright red Arctic Cat was a noisy contraption and it would scare the deer. I was glad to be on the other side of the property on the Opener. He even forgot the camo cover. However, SuperCore got The Monarch this year. So much for my sensibilities having anything to do with the deer’s.

What I can say is deer activity declined dramatically at SuperCore’s two blinds as well as the rest of ours after the first two days of season. Whether this was due to the weather or hunter activity I cannot say. I can also say that riding about in the deer wagon collecting gear, hunters and such must be counted into this. The bottom line is that the ATV did not have a serious negative effect on the deer.

We had about a week’s worth of lousy hunting after the Opener. Some blamed this year on a “trickle rut.” What I saw was anything but a trickle. The rut was getting to the peak right as The Opener started. My guess is that breeding was occurring during the next week. We do not usually have an Opener this early in November. When it does happen, we see big bucks. After nearly a decade at D&DH arguing over Alsheimer versus LaRue, I’m left thinking they’re both bunk. Ruts peak just one side or the other of Veteran’s Day in this part of the world. If Rifle Season coincides with it, you’re going to have a potentially good year. All but two of our largest bucks have been taken before November 15.

The woods were comparatively silent this year. Shooting activity was well under 1 shotstring per minute in the first 2 hours of the start of season. That’s remarkable. However, it is also remarkable that it did not show up in the Telecheck tallies. Bracken County, the Northeast Region, and the state of Kentucky as a whole had the second best season with last year setting the record. What I can say is that mid-day activity on the Opener was high. There were shots going off all day. This would have been a good day to stay out the whole day.

The past few seasons, I have noticed that our most remote pastures get a lot of activity Opening Weekend. My surmise is that deer are running onto our property from the neighbors. This year was no different. I was viewing doe from mid-afternoon on.

All deer we shot this year were taken with 30-06. The 150 and 165 grain loads seem to do as well as you can ask. We were all shooting loads that have been the same for at least a decade. I had a lot of experiments planned, and they just did not happen. Angus took the longest shot to date at our camp, 220 yards. I know this is not an extreme distance, but until recently the average shot we were taking was well inside 100 yards.

We did not have a lot of new gear this year. The L-E-Vator was the one big new addition. You already know what I think of that. This was one of those years where everything worked just the way it should.

One gear standout worth mentioning again is my Buck 113 Ranger Skinner knife.

I bought it for last year’s deer season. So far it has been through 4 deer and two turkeys and I can still shave with it. I’ve been carrying a Buck 110 Folding Hunter since Reagan’s first term. I tried a bunch of others over the years, but kept coming back to the Buck. I bought the 113, because I realized the 110’s clipped point was just too long for working in the chest cavity of a small deer. I needed a slightly shorter blade. I still carry the 110 in the field. I keep the fixed-bladed 113 back at camp.

At the top of the Do-List for 2017 will be serious work on the treestands. I have a half-dozen older buddy stands. The last one was purchased in 2006. The manufacturer, Hunter’s View, is out of business. Some of these stands have just not been producing the past few years. Others, like the one at Newstand, are situated where they are just too hard to access. Shooting a deer at Newstand invariably ends up with hours spent dragging the deer from the lowest elevations of the farm. There are just easier places to hunt. Finally, time has taken its toll. The stand at Virginia is the oldest. It has been up since 2001. It is rusting in some potentially critical spots. It needs to be retired.

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