Skip to main content

To hunt a huge buck, you need to think like one

That is our mentality as we drag that target outside each weekend and measure out distance in the snow.

For three years, I have been after this huge buck and he has stayed nocturnal.  After this past rifle season ended and Dad stayed in the woods with his muzzle loader, he saw the deer pattern back to their pre-rifle ways. They were back to traveling the paths that we assumed they used and they were coming out earlier and earlier. Dad didn't shoot a deer but he saw the small buck that we had around and a few does.

For the first time, it was blatantly obvious that rifle hunters were moving these deer around.  While we had been toying with it, it was clear that we needed to get into archery to try and get the upper hand on those deer.

My first grouping of the day
Hubby is WAY better than I am right now and he can pretty much call his shot and hit it.  He is working on his distance now. I am back at the start, trying to figure out how to get my sights just right and work on arm strength.  That is my biggest hurdle; being able to hold the bow steady before, during and after the release like I do with my rifle.



I still have not found my arrow but Hubby lost two of his (I recovered one for him) so now we are both down to 5 arrows and hoping that the snow melt will reveal our missing arrows.

Practice, Practice, Practice!



Labels:

Comments

  1. Tom HamApril 02, 2016

    nice group! looks like the craze is treating you well. I'm helping my friend get into this whole bowhunting thing too. I tunred the bow down to 50lbs for him just to gain that muscle memory, its more in the band than in the arms I think. And I always tell people, when you get a little tired, put the bow down. When I practice in the shop before we open and get pooped after 20 shots, i put it down...start the coffee, fire up the computer and then go back to it. If you feel some target panic and can't control that pin floating, just let the string up and breath in for 5 seconds, hold your breath for 5 seconds and breath out for 5 seconds, it totally resets your brain and muscles! oh, here i am rambling!

    ReplyDelete
  2. ErinApril 02, 2016

    Tom, you can ramble anytime!! Thank you for cheerin me on and reading these post :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Taking Turkeys to Texas

There are a few less turkeys in Maine to hunt this year. A few months ago, Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife in partnership with the National Wild Turkey Federation , captured and released more than 50 birds into East Texas with the hope of rebuilding their population.   “Eastern turkeys are where the restocking efforts originally began,” explained Shawn Roberts, Director of Field Operations for the National Wild Turkey Federation, “We tried in the 1920’s but it didn’t work.  We tried pen-raised birds and that didn’t work either. The only thing that was successful was to trap birds and relocate them to good habitat.” “We started this current effort in the early ‘80s and we had to begin looking outside the state to see if we could get them moved in. We didn’t want to violate The Lacey Act so we had to come up with a way to compensate the states that were giving up a resource either by trading other wildlife or paying them monetarily,” said Roberts. Texas is on the very edge o
Post a Comment
Read more

Utilizing technology to make you more aware

Staci and I were roaming around the woods on a piece of property that she knew. It was snowing and we were chasing deer tracks to see if we could find some early sheds. It was a perfect day to be out in the woods and we were relaxed and not really paying attention to where we were going. We knew the border of the property and we knew that if we walked long enough we would hit roads or the bog and find our way back. We got to a point where we thought we knew where we were but we were not sure. Staci got out her compass to take a waypoint to make sure we were going in the right direction to get back to the truck. I took out my phone and turned on OnX. Within seconds we knew where we were, where the property borders were in relation to us and we could watch the dot (that represented us) on the map move as we walked out of the woods and got closer to the truck. In another adventure, my son and I headed out on a shed hunting mission.  When we got into the woods, I turned on the tracker
Post a Comment
Read more

Where are the women?

This week, my interview with Steve at The Maine Outdoorsman went live. Steve said yesterday 200 people hit his site viewing over 500 pages. That is a lot of people reading about little ole me and hunting. Why? When I think of women who are in the general public's eye and hunt, I can think of 2 - Country singer Miranda Lambert and Sarah Palin. Why only two? Why is the female hunter such a fascinating thing? (I should probably note that I do not have cable so any and all female hunters on the hunting stations are lost to me. I'll keep it to the general public because that's what I am familiar with.) People/media were fascinated by the fact that they could get footage of Palin and her gun, shooting (and gutting) animals but I feel like the nostalgia would be lost if they had the same footage of McCain. Lambert and her hubby Blake Shelton tweet photos of their kills, and comment on what/where they are hunting. I only know this because I follow both. That's it.
15 comments
Read more