With deer season just around the corner here in the lowcountry, and with hog season open all year, total scent control is something that every hunter should be working on to achieve the results they want!
But have you read all of the scent control articles in the many hunting magazines, and yet you still continue to get busted before you can pull the trigger on the monster whitetail or giant boar of your dreams?
That’s because most of the outdoor writers’ greatly oversimplify the truly difficult, and monotonous task of becoming and more importantly staying scent free. Most of the them just tell you to bathe in scent free soap, wash your clothes in scent free detergent, spay down with some type of scent killing spray, wear rubber boots and scent-adsorbing clothing and you will be fine.
However while saying this is going to save your hunting, the writers then insist that you stay down wind. Well, were I hunt, that just doesn’t cut it. Not only does the wind change all of the time, but on the small tracts of land that most sportsmen get to hunt in South Carolina, you must work darn hard to put a great buck, big hog or even an fat doe in front of you. Because with deer rifle season running from August 15 to January 1 and two bucks a day allowed in most of the low country, the deer that survive even one or two years become masters of evasion. Also, while some may disagree, the feral hogs that are hunted year-round are just as tough! So while taking the normal outdoor writer’s casual approach to scent control will help, it still won’t keep you from burning out a couple of hundred acre track over so long of a period without some important additional steps being taken.
Probably most critical to my success is NOT wearing rubber boots. Most rubber boots, even the ones that say they are scent free, are not. Smell them. If you can smell them, the deer and hogs certainly can. And since your feet sweat in the rubber, the bacteria builds up on your feet, their leftovers causing odor to be left on the ground as well as sent air born as you walk.
I wear Rocky snake boots pretty much all year round since it rarely gets that cold. And even when it does, my feet breath with the help of some synthetic socks, so they don’t sweat or get cold. More importantly, with some additional steps, they don’t stink. I soak them in Atsko’s sport wash for an hour, scrub them out and rinse them in fresh water before letting them hang in the sun all day. Make sure to start this process early in the day so they don’t stay damp overnight and get moldy, or put them in front of a strong fan until dry.
Next I wash all of my hunting stuff, not just my clothes, in sport wash as well. That means my sling, calls, pull up rope, and bino buddy in addition to my hat, gloves and head net. I also wash my rain gear and anything else that I plan to put into my also washed scentlok backpack.
I then spray anything that can’t be washed down with Atsko’s no odor spray. While it doesn’t absorb odor like some of the newer carbon-based sprays, it actually kills the odor molecules and prevents bacteria from growing while still being safe enough to wash out your mouth. Which, by the way, actually works to kill bad breath, another culprit of many hunts gone bad. Just as importantly, No Odor kills ALL odors not just human odor; this includes gasoline and oil! This is vitally important since hunters are likely to pick up all kinds of smells on the way to the stand.
I then suggest that you store everything in scent-tight bins until your ready to hunt. Or if you can, do what I do and just leave them out on your screened porch or on your clothes line. But watch out because there is something irresistible about scent-free things to animals. They just feel compelled to mark it in some way! And of course shake them out before you put them on; I say this because I haven’t been the same since a spider with a foot-wide diameter crawled out of my pants leg one day!
Next I thoroughly clean my weapon of choice with slip2000, a remarkable scent-free synthetic oil that blows away traditional gun oils. Not only does it not stink but it can actually make your gun shoot faster and better by greatly reducing friction in the barrel over standard oils.
The day of the hunt I shower with Atsko’s no odor soap and apply some scent-free deodorant just prior to walking out the door. I then quickly drive to my hunting area where I finish dressing and then dust down with Knight and Hale’s Stealth Dust. It’s a clay based powder that absorbs human odors that you apply by lightly rubbing a sock filled with it all over your clothes and in and on your boots. It works like a champ, even when my clothes are soaked with sweat from hunting in the 100 degree heat, I just keep dusting down throughout the day to keep all odors from forming.
Then after getting totally packed up and ready for my walk to my stand, I give my boot bottoms a spray with no odor to make sure that I am not transferring any truck odors to the ground in my hunting area. And while walking to my stand, I also try not to touch anything I don’t have to as well as not making any sound in case deer are bedded near by or already headed my way.
Once at my stand and having quietly climbed up, I periodically spray down with no odor and then redust myself. I also chew some of the new gumoflage gum that is on the market. It tastes like your eating a pine cone but it does kill the stench of anything that you have eaten. It also has cloraphyll in it which is supposed to help kill your body’s odor from the inside out.
This step by step fanatical approach allows me to go undetected as I slip into and out of my hunting area year round, and to take some great bucks and hogs. This program has also helped many of my friends like Will pictured above with his nice 9 point. However this is not a one time thing… You must do this each and every time you enter the woods for the program to truly work. Otherwise you just burn out your area and there are no animals left to shoot, even if you do happen to show up scent free a few times.
Try it, and I think you will find that even when that wind changes paths, your quarry won’t.
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And Matt did hit the nail on the head when he commented that he hoped that my mom didn’t read my blog since it said that we were going down to surprise her. She, just like my wife, hardly ever reads it since she has to hear about all of my adventures anyway, so I didn’t think anything about putting that info up. However she “accidentally” clicked on my blog that morning, so she did know we were coming… but she says that it didn’t take anything away from us making the trip down.
