I am a little irritated from this past weekend, so I am going to vent this morning… We had a couple of “hunters” up from South Florida for a three day hunt on our trophy tract where we kill all of our biggest bucks, and that is because the 3200 acres has been trophy managed for the past 15 years, making it a true big-buck paradise. However, it is still a free-range hunt, meaning that factors like the weather, hunter’s shooting ability and what stage of the rut we are in have a HUGE impact on killing a big buck there. In essence, it is NOT a guaranteed hunt.
Well, the company these guys work for bought them a hunt with the understanding that it was still a little early in the season for the best hunting, but since that was the only time they could come, they were willing to give it a shot. They showed up and immediately started talking about all of the places that they had hunted and how many big bucks they had shot - with almost all of them inside of a high-fence. They also bragged about how they only cut the horns off of 140 class deer since they had so many bigger ones in their trophy rooms… Blah, blah, blah!
I could tell right then and there that they were not going to fun to hunt with, considering that a 140 inch buck in the lowcountry is a MONSTER, as well as damn hard to kill under fair-chase conditions. But we did our best to put them in the right spots and put up with them. However, not only did we have some of the worst weather this week for deer hunting - windy and pouring rain, they did everything they could to make sure they didn’t kill a buck including leaving there stands shortly after daylight since they weren’t “seeing anything”. One guy even commented how the five scrapes that were withing 100 yards of his stand had not been hit since the rain that stopped just before daylight… which is, as far as I am concerned, exactly why he should have stayed in his stand and waited for a buck to get there after the bad weather passed.
And what made it even more irritating, was that about the same time these guys were getting down, two of our guides were checking a stand just down the road when they spotted a huge buck cruising around! It seemed that if they couldn’t walk around a pen and pick which deer they wanted, then we were not the place for them to be. So they headed home, and we headed out to top sow some seeds in our food plots behind the lodge so the heavy rain could beat them in to the dirt. And what do you think we ran in to about 8am? A monster cruising around. As a matter of fact, he was only 8 yards off of the road, and he tried to duck down to let us go by. Only Bubba’s good eyes spotted him.
That night we put several hunters in the woods. A couple of hog hunters saw deer but no hogs while another one saw hogs but couldn’t get a shot. The deer hunter in the stand where we ran into the monster shot a really nice 7 point, then had a 10 point come out a few minutes later that stood under the feeder until we arrived to pick him up. Our hunter could have paid extra and shot that deer too, but since he hunts with us all of the time, he chose to leave him for another day and another guest…. they were all real hunters, and that is real hunting.
Jeff
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This past week at Cypress Creek Hunting Lodge, I had the great fortune of guiding a couple of hunters looking to put their first deer down - Tony from West Virgina and his Father in law “Coot” from Columbia - along with their friend and veteran big buck killer Larry. They both had great hunts and well, just check out Tony (left pic) with his very first deer and first buck! Congratulations… We look forward to having both of you with us again next year, and thank you guys very much for the nice emails about how much you enjoyed hunting with us.
