Ben's 2023 Semi-Live Hunt Log

[TheBenHoyle]

Not a whole lot to report. I have been making some plans for the fall. Going to hunt a second firearm season with a new hunting buddy. Picked up a fall shotgun turkey permit. I have tentative plans for a private land archery rut hunt in Ohio with another buddy. And I am going to try to find time to get out archery hunting with my duck hunting buddy. He went out with me once a few years ago and never asked again, but recently we were talking and I think he was waiting for another invite. And that's all I need to hear, I'll make the time.

I built a little canopy/shelter over my archery targets in the back yard so I can leave them out all the time. It makes me shoot a little bit more often since it is out in the back yard as a visual reminder. I'm currently working on getting better with my dad's old recurve. He got it from a friend in the late 60s and I am hoping I can get proficient enough to get out and hunt with it this fall. I'd like to take a deer with it in the next few years. I recently switched to a 3 fingers under grip and it brings the shaft of the arrow closer to my eyeliner, which helps a little I think.

Aiming is just so different than with a compound though. I have every confidence that my aim is true with a peep sight on my compound, but I have not yet developed an aiming technique with the recurve that I have any confidence in. I don't even understand what I am doing. It might take some time...

Ultimately, I would like to build a recurve and take a deer with it. So this is an intermediate step. Once I know how to aim with a recurve, I'll start learning how to build a bow. That will take some time too...

Anyway, I'm itching to get out hunting, but I have 2-1/2 months before my seasons start. In 3 weeks I can start picking up OTC tags and then sign up for some public access. It'll all be here before I know it.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

I've been shooting my dad's old recurve a decent amount. Starting to figure out how to aim it consistently.



That's my grouping at 15 yards. Need to move back to 20 and see if I can get that grouping. I am definitely planning on hunting with it this fall.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

Bought my Illinois Archery tags today and firmed up some plans to go out after deer with my duck hunting buddy.

It's getting close now. Gonna have to start growing my beard.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

I've been shooting that recurve and I thought I was making progress, but this week I have been all over the place. I think I shoot better instinctual, but I am trying to be a gap shooter, because instinctive seems like luck and I want to know how to aim and have confidence that my arrow is going to go where I want it to go.

Anyway, while I was struggling with that I decided to set that aside and do a little woodworking (see the woodworking hunt talkers thread for the full write up).



I made the bentwood stick that connects the upper and lower parts of the quiver. It's not as elegant as some, but I made it and now I can get back to the handwork of figuring out how to aim this dang thing.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

One of the big reasons I got into hunting was to eat wild turkey and venison and any other game I could get my hands on.

Sadly, I don't cook it as regularly as I would like. With my hunting season starting soon, I decided to pull out some venison and make the family dinner.

Last year, when I was cutting up my doe, I made a point of liberating the flat iron steaks since I had heard they were worth the effort. They were not large.

I was really wanting to cook them up but it wouldn't have been enough to feed the 4 of us. So I pulled out a section of backstrap and the tenderloin, which was small to begin with, but also I had hacked it into a couple of pieces accidentally.

So I seared and roasted the backstrap and tenderloin and grilled the flat irons. Served it with homemade spaetzle, green beans, pan gravy and mushrooms.



It was a hit with the family and now I feel better about planning on getting some more they fall. I will definitely pull the flat irons out again. They were this, but they cooked up quick and were very tender.

 

[Pucky Freak]

I think I shoot better instinctual, but I am trying to be a gap shooter, because instinctive seems like luck and I want to know how to aim and have confidence that my arrow is going to go where I want it to go.

Dump gap and stick with instinctual. It’s not luck. Just my 2 cents. If you’re the best at instinctual now, you’ll only get better with practice, and you never need to aim. Just my 2 cents as an *unbiased* instinctual stickbow archer Been out of that game a while now, but I’ve been itching to get back in w/ 40 lb limbs.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

Dump gap and stick with instinctual. It’s not luck. Just my 2 cents. If you’re the best at instinctual now, you’ll only get better with practice, and you never need to aim. Just my 2 cents as an *unbiased* instinctual stickbow archer Been out of that game a while now, but I’ve been itching to get back in w/ 40 lb limbs.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not incredibly consistent with my brows, but I do feel now that if I just shoot instinctually I am better than if I try to monkey around with trying to shoot a gap.

It makes sense, I bowl better, throw darts better, shoot pool better, etc. if I just do it and don't try to force myself to aim or whatever. Unfortunately, even then I don't do any of those things at really high levels.

That being said I think I can hit a deer at 20 yards or less and I have had a lot of encounters at those ranges, so I will likely get a chance this fall.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

My season opens in 2 days, but between now and then I have to drive to Des Moines, IA for a marching band competition and back... I really want to get out for an evening hunt on Sunday, but it really depends on the departure time from Iowa on Sunday morning. If I get out, I'll post about it. If not, it will be another week before I can start my season.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

Opening day came and went without me going out.

My trip to DesMoines was pretty brutal. I am on the equipment team for the marching band, so we left late Friday night and got very little sleep.

Saturday we were out in the sun and heat all day, with the last performance at 10:30. It was 1 in the morning before we got everything loaded and back to the hotel.

Another short night of sleep, followed by a 6ish hour drive and an hour and a half of unloading equipment led to me dead asleep on the couch at 5 instead of trying to catch the last hour or so of daylight.

This is another busy week for the band, so I can't use any vacation time to go out, but I see a cold front coming through so on Sunday it will be in the 50s for my next opportunity to get out. Should be good.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

Going to put some venison meat sticks on the smoker tomorrow and Saturday I'm grilling up some bacon wrapped barbecue goose breast bites. And then Sunday I'm going out to chase deer with a buddy. He's never shot one with a bow and never shot a buck, so I'm hoping we can change that. I'm taking my dad's recurve bow so I'll only get serious if there is a deer within 15 yards.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

Went out yesterday with my buddy. Mile and a half bike ride, quarter mile hike, realize I left my climbing sticks in the car... Back to the car, back to the tree. And now I am exhausted before I have even gone up the tree.

But it was a nice day for a hunt and we picked a good spot, we thought. Several hours later with just a hawk sighting and no deer, we told ourselves it was good to know that there were no deer in that spot. We will have to try a different spot next time.

We did hear a flock of turkeys fly up in the trees on the other side of the creek about 80 yards away. They were on the no hunting side of the creek all day...

Also, about a half hour before sunset we heard a coyote howl to the east of us and that was met with more howls all around us. Probably 10 or 20 coyotes joined in, north south east and west. Confirms my obesrvations that there are too many coyotes in this area.

I'm going to try to get out to my parents house next Sunday and loop in a trip to some public where I have a trail camera that needs its batteries replaced. If I can work that out I'll probably climb a tree to see what's happening.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

I didn't think I would get a chance to go out last weekend, between the rain and the marching band competition on Saturday and my need to go help my dad hang drywall on Sunday I just figured I'd punt and pick up my bow again in a couple weeks.

But then I saw that the rain was ending a Sunday would be clear and cool. Plus my dad made it sound like we could be done a couple hours before sunset and it completely changed my outlook.

I reached out to my dad's friend to see if there was a stand I could hunt and he said I could go back to what he calls the corner stand. It is on the edge of a creek in the corner of a large piece of CRP. I have had a lot of good encounters in that stand so I was pretty happy.

I got to the parking spot and struggled to put my release on my wrist, probably spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what was going on, before I realized it goes on my right, not the left wrist. That's just how it goes sometimes when you are juggling too many things and you lose sight of the easy things.

Anyway, I am finally walking in to my stand and I get to the edge of the CRP where there is a mowed path that meanders enough that you can't see all the way into the corner. So I am trying to be slow and methodical as I walk in, but sure enough I come around a little bend and stop in my tracks as I see a new section of the path and there is a deer about 40 yards in front of me. We are both stopped and staring each other down. I was very still and waiting for the deer to look away or move and thinking I could just sink into the tall grass to my right and then maybe move a little to get an ambush if it continued on.

As I am thinking about it, I see that there are many more deer, like 4 more and they are all bucks. He looks back over his back, head fully turned and I freeze. I miss my opportunity to disappear. I'm stunned by the idea that there a 5 bucks headed my way on the path...

Now we are back to the stare down. This goes on for about a minute. He looks back again and I am about to dive to the side, but before I can he takes 5-6 steps to my right behind a tree and another buck steps up in his place. Now I'm staring down a different buck, this is a nice 8 pointer. I see in the way back of the line there is a really nice buck and 2 forkys.

Next thing I know the first buck pops out on my right and I am staring down both of them. It looks like he has a small 6 point rack. I take the risk of moving to range him. 24 yards. I manage to get an arrow nocked and am considering trying to draw back, but it would be a straight on shot and I don't have any confidence in making that shot on a fully-alert deer.

Finally, he decides he has seen enough and he bounds off to the southeast. The rest of them follow his lead and I am left there shaking my head, wondering if I would have been better positioned if I hadn't wasted so much time figuring out my release...

I have a little picture where I show my direction of travel in red and the direction of travel of the deer as I observed it in blue.



I marked the stand in orangey-yellow. I can only imaging that getting in to the stand 45 minutes earlier would have had me set up perfectly for those bucks... Oh well, the drywall wasn't going to hang itself.

As I continued to the stand I ended up running into some toms in the brush just to the west of my stand. Marked in green. I ended up taking a shot, missing and having them all fly south. Lost an arrow...

I finally got to my stand and spent the next 2 hours looking at this mushroom growing 18 feet up in a tree.



Those turkeys didn't go too far, I ended up hearing them fly up into a tree about 50-60 yards south of me. even heard one of them gobble which is always a highlight.

It could have gone better, but I was just glad to get out and be in a tree.

Next weekend is the final marching band competition so I won't be able to get out. Hopefully the weekend after that I will though.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

The marching band season is over and to celebrate I'm taking this Friday off to go out and try to capitalize on my fall shotgun turkey tag. Plan on sitting all day but I haven't gotten the word on where I can go yet. The guy I usually talk to said he would have his son in law call me.

Then on Sunday I am going out with my buddy who I hunted with a few weeks ago. Got to get him back up in a tree again. We have a different spot picked out and I hope it will be more productive.

a week from Thursday I am headed rot Ohio with another body for an archery deer hunt on his family's land. It should be the rut by then, which my buddy has never experienced. I hope he gets to see a lot of action and to put an arrow through his first deer. Extended forecast makes it look like there will be a cold front coming through just before we get there. We will have 4 days to get it done.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

I took Friday off of work and headed out by my parents to see what I could see on an all day sit. I was in a stand on the east edge of the CRP field I hunted a couple of weeks ago.

I have known about this stand for a few years but never taken the opportunity to hunt it. I know that it can be a good one for turkey activity since I have observed the turkeys under it many times in the past.

The morning started off slow. I didn't hear any turkeys, although it was very windy so they could have been in the stand with me and I might not have heard them.

About 8 I saw a nice looking buck about 150 yards south of me, but he was headed west. He was probably going to pass by the stand I hunted 2 weeks ago, but it was too late for me to do anything about that.

At about 8:30 or 9 even I noticed a hen flock of about 14 in the hay field at the edge of the CRP. They were 350 yards west of me.


Again, I thought they were going to move south along the mowed path on west edge of the CRP, where I had the buck encounter in my earlier post. So I sat there thinking I really picked the wrong stand location. But then I saw them walking right along the edge of the taller CRP and I ranged them at 180 yards and then 140 yards...

I considered getting down and crawling through the CRP to try to get closer, but I felt like I had a decent chance that they would come my way to get to the standing corn to my east. But I never did see them again. They either hit the second mowed path in the center of the CRP and headed south to the creek/woods or they kept to the edge of the CRP and went through the backyard of the house on the road to get into the corn. I was in a nice grouping of roosting trees, so I thought I might see them at dusk again. I did not...

It was an incredibly uneventful day. a couple of ducks and a small handful of geese in the pond to the southeast, a lone doe walking and then running along the same path as the buck, but about 8 hours later. And then right at sunset, 2 does came out of the corn right behind me. They were about 100 yards away on a piece of property I can't hunt. I was hoping they might come my way, but they walked up the edge of the field heading north.



It wasn't terribly productive and I underestimated the wind, so the final few hours as the temperature dropped was pretty hard to put up with. But I feel like I understand the layout of this property a little better and I definitely will keep this in mind for later in the season when I see the turkeys in the field to the east when the corn is picked. They will definitely be roosting in these trees and I just might know how to capitalize on that.

I did get a nice view of the moon rising though.

Next up is a trip to Ohio with my buddy. I'm hoping he can get his first deer. And I am hoping I can connect with a nice buck.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

Packing up tonight so I can leave at 7am tomorrow for my trip to hunt in Ohio with my buddy. I have a real good feeling that he will get his first deer and I am hoping to connect with a good buck. We have 4 days, although with drive time it really becomes an evening hunt, 2 full days and possibly a morning hunt. And the rut should just be starting according to the reports we have been getting.

I pulled the trigger on a good meat grinder last night. LEM had a 31% off deal that was just for Halloween. I had been watching the price on the machine I wanted and that was the best deal I thought I would see anytime soon.

I probably won't post about these hunts until I get back home afterwards but I hope to have some pictures and stories to share.

 

[duckhunt]

Good luck

 

[MT_elk]

Congrats on the turkey. Love the display you made with the feathers. Good luck on the rest of your hunts.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

I'm back from Ohio. Had a real nice adventure but don't have any fresh venison. I could have filled my tag, but it wasn't my main priority for the hunt.

I have been helping a friend get into hunting and I was hoping in his third year of hunting he would get his first deer. In the first two years he has had very little deer action, only seeing them from afar and like a total of 5 deer in two years.

Last year I shot a doe while hunting and he helped field dress it and then he helped butcher it. I was hoping this year he would get a deer and I could help him. Other than that I was holding out for a nice buck.

We got into town late afternoon on Thursday and quickly got ready to hit the woods. There was standing corn on the north edge of the woods and a picked field of beans to the East. As we were walking in we bumped 4-5 deer to the west or into the corn. I stopped and found a buddy watching me in the corn.



I was a little worried that we had goober up the evening hunt, but I was hoping that they would come back in before dark.

As it turned out we were covered up in deer almost immediately after we got set up.
I saw a nice 8-10 pointer come by. Ranged him at about 35 yards, but he skirted around me in an area obscured by brush and down branches.

My buddy had some little bucks and does near him, but not quite in range. A little later I had a doe broadside at 20 yards. I thought about shooting her, but we had only been in the stand for an hour and a half and the action was pretty good also I decided to be patient.

By dark, the bucks had chased all of the does of the the corn or the woods to the west so we slipped out with a plan to get after them in the morning.

My buddy was super excited about all the action he had seen and our hopes were pretty high for the hunt.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

The morning action was bonkers. We had does and bucks all over the place. It was very exciting until about 11:30 and then the deer just disappeared. I am assuming that the bucks chased them off to the west or to the corn. The afternoon was brutal waiting for nothing to happen. But then we had some action in the evening.

My buddy took his first shot ever at a deer in the morning. He misjudged the distance and shot right over her. Later in the afternoon he had a buck rush in to 15 yards, all bristled up and looking for a fight, but after the boring hours of no action, he was caught off guard and wasn't ready. When he moved to get his bow the buck saw something and ran off. So he didn't get a deer out of the deal, but it was the right kind of increase in action from the past that he was very excited.

For me, I was watching the deer movement, hoping I would see deer head over by him, but I was also seeing a couple of really nice 8-10 point bucks. I had one come right in to me and stop at 25 yards facing me. He was right being a sapling and I figured he would step right or left to go past it and I would get a shot in the 20 yard range, but he must have seen some kind of movement that spooked him because he wheel around and went away about 10 yards, and then he got behind that screen or brush and did a quarter circle at 35 yards and then headed away to the west...

This was after I had passed up a chip shot 20 yard or less on this 6 pointer.

In retrospect I would have been happy to have shot the 6 pointer because I would have been able to shoot him in almost the exact spot that the doe I shot last year was in, but I had hoped he would stick around and end up near my buddy.

Later I had a mini-stand off with a doe at 20 yards. She was standing in the first couple of rows of corn and I had no shot, but the corn was all trampled a couple steps to my right and she was facing that direction. If she had taken a couple steps I would have had a shot, but after 20 minutes of just standing there she slipped to the north into the corn stalks.

It was an exciting day but we were both a little disappointed that after all that activity we didn't have a deer on the ground.

 

[TheBenHoyle]

Saturday morning we were out in the same spot, but there was little to no action as the sun came up. We were only going to stay until noon, so at about 10 I got down and told my buddy to stay in his spot and I was going to still hunt along the east edge down to a creek and then along the creek that angled back up by him. My hope was that if I was slow and steady enough I would bump something gently his way.

It was definitely worth doing, since I feel I have a better idea of this area and I am sure we will hunt it again next year. And it almost worked in terms of getting a shot on a deer.



Not long after I found this I encountered a spike buck on the other side of the creek and he seemed curious about what I was. I don't think he saw me, but he heard me moving through the leaves. I had been making turkey noises and scratching at the leaves as I went hoping that if I bumped anything I didn't bump them too hard.

Well that spike cam to the creek and was moving a lot trying to figure out what was going on and his movement brought a forty over to the creek from my side. I had a partially obscured 40 yard shot on him full broadside, but I wanted to get a little closer and away from the obstruction.

Although he had no idea I was there, as I was inching up, the spike crossed the creek and the forty ran after him. They ran close to where my buddy was, but before they got close they angled to the west and disappeared.

That was it for the hunt, but we figured out that the northwest corner is a natural pitch point where the woods, creek and field edge create a little funnel. I think next year we will set my buddy up in there and he should be able to cover anything that comes in or goes out to the west.

I did find a spot near the creek that had a lot of sign so depending on the wind I might try to hunt that next year. It was a great adventure even though we didn't bring anything home.

I'm going to go out by parents house this afternoon to try my luck with the rut action. More to come.