My "Hail Mary" Stand/Plan

I think this is going to be my outside the box year as far as what plans I have in place for this coming hunting season. I hung a new stand a couple saturdays ago on a tree line that I have hunted before but not in this spot. When I hunted it before I was farther to the east and really never had a deer close enough to shoot at. I am calling it a Hail Mary because it really is in a spot I feel is either going to be awesome or stink.





My theory is this. Last year there was a small tornado that hit here. Although it was rated F0 it did some pretty significant damage to the neighbors house and camper trailer. Their fifth wheel camper ended up on their house. It also knocked down about a 50-75 yard swath of trees in this tree line. (yellow circle on the ariel below) What I believe has happened is a buck is using these trees to bed in. They are still laying down, the farmer to the south had pushed them off of his property but they are still lying all over the place. Its made for some pretty good cover in my book. So if this holds true I think I have a good set up to catch a buck moving in and out of this area. The green dotted lins are travel routes that I know deer use. So regardless if a buck is in that area it might still be a good stand. What you can't really see on the picture is the fence that goes around the neighbors property, it goes east to where the green dotted line crosses the green field on the ariel. This fence causes the deer to go around it and thus makes a pretty good pinch point at the SE corner of the fence just to the left of where my stand is.


The area to the north outlined in Red is the sanctuary and I know that the heaviest area of travel is from the SE corner of the Sanctuary down across corn field and then across the driveway to this fence line. In fact I found the shed to the buck i named "sanctuary" on this fence line. So this might give me a chance to go after him or "peeping tom" with a north, northwest, or west wind(blue arrows) which I cant hunt in the tripod next to the sanctuary.



I am going to leave my camera over the mineral block for the rest of July and maybe into August, however once it gets late in August I am going to move it to this fence line. I will probably put it near the driveway for a week or two. See I see anybody going through there and what time they are, then I will put it to the east of the stand on the tree line, probably facing the corn field to the south and see if anybody is moving through there. This will give me a great idea of whats going on without getting in to close to this area.



When I first started hunting here I would see a really nice buck in this spot quite a bit when leaving at dark after hunting. So I know it has held them before and I have a hunch it will again this year. We will see.

June Trail Camera Pictures

Well it is that time of year again. Actually I had my camera out early June already. With the lifting of the baiting ban it will be cool to have a mineral block out and see who shows up. I have already had some good signs as you can see below. One word of advice I can give is if you put a camera out make sure you account for the fact that not everything has grown up yet. When I put my camera out in early june a lot of the weeds and trees were not fully grown yet. You will notice the branch in the screen. It got leaves and dropped into the view of my camera so I got about 150 pictures of it whenever the wind blew it. So when I checked the card last Jacob and I did some major clearing of the tall weeds and that branch. So the July pictures should be much better. July and August are the big months for antler growth so the next couple posts should be much better pictures.


However, I was able to get about 60 pictures of deer though in June which is much better than I normally do. As you can see below some of them are really starting to grow already. Its hard for me to tell now if any of these are any of the bucks I am looking for, namely "peeping tom" and "sanctuary" but the one in the first, second, and last pictures seems to be a really nice size bodied deer. The bases of the antlers just don't seem that big so I don't think its either of them. Like I said earlier its really hard for me to tell at this stage who is who. Hopefully, in a couple weeks I will have some pictures of one or both of those deer.





Anyway, I posted some of the better pictures below.

Canada Fishing Trip 2011

Well we completed our 2011 fishing trip into Canada. As usual it was a blast, we ate great and caught a bunch of fish. The one thing we did notice this year was that we were not catching the numbers like we usually do up there. However, the weather was very nice this time and it was pretty nice for a change. It kind of felt like everything was a couple weeks later up there since it had been pretty warm for a while and the ice had been off for some time as well.





Even though we didn't catch the numbers we were used to the size of fish we caught were much bigger than normal. We caught a lot of Walleye 20" to 25" and that is really good size for that far north. Also, we caught some really big Northerns, although we did not get over that 40" mark that we have been striving for since we started going up there. How close did we come? Uncle Ron missed it by .5" his Northern was 39.5" This tied the Northern caught by my father in law the first year we went up there, in fact it was the first fish caught of everyone.





The day my uncle caught that Northern will go down as one of my best days fishing ever. It all started with him hooking into a really nice Northern in the morning 35-37" just before I was going to net the fish it did the northern barrel roll and snapped the line at the boat. We were discouraged and didn't expect to see another fish like that. So we started to troll around the area and about about an hour later I hooked a nice 31" Northern. We took pictures, measured him and let him go. I retied my line and through back out and set the hook on another nice 30" northern. Now I was getting excited. I let him go through back out and set the hook on another big pike 32" this time. We took pictures measured him and let him go. As you can imagine I was very excited because it is hard to catch a pike over 30" let alone 3 in a row within a half hour or so. So we kept fishing I caught a walleye and then in the exact same spot I just caught the 31" and 32" I hooked and caught a 35.5" Northern. 4 Northerns over 30 inches in 45 minutes. Best day fishing for me ever.





I had not even finished celebrating my catch and my uncle set the hook. After one heck of a fight we netted the biggest fish of the trip. His 39.5" Northern weighed 14 lbs. So 5 Northerns of that caliber in about an hour to an hour and a half is not to shabby.








Ron's 39.5" Northern








My 4th northern 35.5"s

My first one 31"s

Biggest Walleye of the trip 25.5" I caught him on the first day.

Some new faces and some new names.

Well I got a chance to compare my big shed to the shed the farmer ran over with his tractor. Despite my first assumption they are not the same deer. The shed that he ran over was from the wide 10 pointer that we had seen last January while house sitting. He is the same deer that was eating the landscaping and standing about 5' outside the window. I guestimate him to be 18-20" wide and a 3.5 year old deer. So that makes two 3.5(now 4.5) year olds that are hanging around and I feel pretty good about how I am set up for them. Really good in fact. The only unknown is who will stay and who will go.

Now the other problem is I gave this deer the name "flat tire" but I was thinking it was the same deer. Now that I know this big one is the same one that was looking in the house I think the name "peeping tom" is a good fit. So we have "Peeping Tom" who just vaulted to the top of my list and the other 10 pointer that I have a lot of history with who I am going to name "sanctuary"

Then there is a 6 pointer that I saw a lot last year who was 1.5 and now will be 2.5. The boys and I found his shed and I saw him a couple times. He was always near "sancuary" so I am going to name him "Sidekick" I think he will be a pretty decent deer, pobably an 8 point, this year, however, he will be getting the pass from me, unless he absolutley explodes this year.

I also got my camera out this past weekend and won't check it for a good couple weeks. So there should be some pretty decent growth goeing on by that time. I put it where I have a pretty good idea that either "peeping tom" or "sanctuary" is going through or both of them. I saw a couple of really good size tracks, really good.

So to say I am anxious is an understatement. I cant wait to see if my plans work. I am going to use my camera to pinpoint where these deer are bedding and once I can figure that out....game on.

Nathan's First Bass

I started packing today for our Canadian Fishing trip today and the boys got excited about going fishing. So after supper we went to my Grandpas and Nathan caught his first bass by himself and Jacob got one to.

$200 Shed and a new name

The farmer that farms the field on Barry's property got a flat tire last week. You can see the culprit below. At first all I knew was that it was a nice 5 point side and pretty big. Barry had Andy the farmer send me the picture below and I had to see more of course. Here is another picture of it. The G2 got cracked off in the tire. After hearing where he road over it and looking at this picture I am 95% sure that its the other side to "The Sanctuary Buck" You can see the pictures below. Next time I am down there I am going to Andy's and we are going to hold them up together but I would be very surprised if they don't match.

You can see the mains are both pretty wide the brows are very similar and they both have long skinny tines.

So this is also brought me to a name change. "The Sanctuary Buck" doesn't really have a great sound to it but I thought it was fitting. I think his name will be "Flat tire" from now on. I will post pictures of the two of them together when I get the chance to go down there and compare them.

My Plan for "the sanctuary buck"

Well by now most of you know about this buck that I saw 3 times last bow season and missed my chance at during gun season, with Julie there to see him as well. I figured its time to give him a name so I have named him "the sactuary buck" named after where he is living and spending most of his time, well last year anyway. I have become quite obsessed with him, especially recently after finding one of his sheds. (see my post 2x ago) He is going to be a 4.5 year old deer this year and that is going to make things even more difficult but this is the best chance at a deer of this caliber I have ever had, so I have to give it my best try. Well the sanctuary is a small 5 acre area that is all tall grass, scrub brush and thorns. It is tucked behind some houses and the topography makes it a very secluded area and perfect for holding a big mature deer. It has little or no trees to hang a stand in, well one tree and that is where I sat last season. Its an ok spot for a stand but I was just a little to far away from the action and my approach route was to much in the open. If you look below at the ariel photo you can see what I am talking about and see why I needed to move. The blue "X" on the top left is where my treestand was last season. The blue "X" on the top right is the ground blind where I missed him from. The yellow circle is where he was when I missed him. The dotted lines are the different routes he took everytime i saw him last year. The area inside the yellow line is the corn field, I know part looks like grass but its all crop field now. The green dotted line is my new access route through the corn field and the red "X" is where I put my tri-pod stand last sunday. The yellow arrows are the only wind directions that I would hunt this stand, south or southwest. Also, one more thing to note where the blue and purple lines converge in the upper left those are apple trees. They did not have any fruit last year but he still was bedding down in there. If there is fruit on them this year its going to be even better. 2 years ago the corn field was beans and I watched dozens of deer pour into this area every night for a week strait from accross the property early season and I didn't know why. I found out that these trees were in here last spring but the late frost killed all the blossoms I believe. So what I did was move my tripod stand into this area. I put it as far into a white pine tree as I could and even dug the feet of it down about 18" into the ground to get the platform lower into the tree. You can see by the pictures below that it worked really good. I will be able to get into this stand when the corn is up undected and when I am in it i am shielded from the sanctuary because of the two trees, so if he is laying anywhere in the sancuary he should not see me get in or sitting in it. Also, this spot is uphill from where i was last year and I can see much better into the sanctuary. I am going to bring more branches in my first sit and zip tie them onto the stand and that will give me even more cover. So now that I have it set up, I am not going to go by it or near this are until Oct. when I hunt it for the first time. I want him to think its safe and to go back in there again and I have learned that if he senses the least bit of pressure he is gone. It would be nice to have a trail camera in there to know what I am up against but I can't risk it so I just have to go off of what I learned last season and my instincts that he will be back in there or worst case scenario, another shooter buck. Anyway to say I am excited about this stand is an understatement.

You can see how well the platform is hidden. My only concern is being silohetted against the sky if the deer are withing 15-20 yards of me so thats why I want to bring in a few more branches.

Barry was on Spring Break but he let me use his tractor and hay wagon which worked awesome because we moved it with just Julie and I. Thanks Barry.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share with everyone because I am pretty excited about this stand and this buck, but also to show what process I use to decide how to set up a stand and that sometimes you have to be a little creative. I love using ariel photos(even on property I know very well) and mapping out the information I know, it gives me the big picture and I use that to determine where I need to be, how I need to get into that spot, what wind, etc. Then after that I figure out how to set up in that spot, hang a stand, ground blind, or what I did here. Hopefully I will get a crack at "the sanctuary buck" and I can feel really proud about how much thought and work myself and Julie put into going after him.