Gerald Martin
Well-known member
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- Jul 3, 2009
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Some of you guys will recognize this country. To avoid contributing to the popularizing of an already hard to draw hunt, the unit will remain nameless. My friend Rick Farthing drew this tag this year and I was able to tag along. As with many special permits, the stories from those "in the know" varied from, "its overated' to "don't shoot anything less than a 190", to "you should have been here five years ago"
Rick set his personal goal of taking a mature buck and had the time to be patient. He knew that killing a big deer in a special unit is not a given and wasn't going to be as picky about score as much as making sure he looked over a lot of deer and shot one he liked.
The reason we started referring to the hunt as The Curse of the XX Unit was that many people have unrealistic expectations, and in a moment of weakness, panic or give up on finding that special buck and shoot an animal that they end up regretting later.
I'm under time constraints so I'll be adding pics and commentary to this thread over the next couple days.
Our summertime scouting turned up this -- https://vimeo.com/47347475
Some of you may have already seen this video but it sets the stage as to what our baseline expectations were. Rick would have been happy with several of these deer.
He wanted to make sure that he held off until the rut kicked in before he filled his tag unless a true monster showed up. He still had his tag intact on the second week of November. I went with him to film that hunt. Here is what we turned up.
https://vimeo.com/53728874
Some of the average bucks we saw.
Rick set his personal goal of taking a mature buck and had the time to be patient. He knew that killing a big deer in a special unit is not a given and wasn't going to be as picky about score as much as making sure he looked over a lot of deer and shot one he liked.
The reason we started referring to the hunt as The Curse of the XX Unit was that many people have unrealistic expectations, and in a moment of weakness, panic or give up on finding that special buck and shoot an animal that they end up regretting later.
I'm under time constraints so I'll be adding pics and commentary to this thread over the next couple days.
Our summertime scouting turned up this -- https://vimeo.com/47347475
Some of you may have already seen this video but it sets the stage as to what our baseline expectations were. Rick would have been happy with several of these deer.
He wanted to make sure that he held off until the rut kicked in before he filled his tag unless a true monster showed up. He still had his tag intact on the second week of November. I went with him to film that hunt. Here is what we turned up.
https://vimeo.com/53728874
Some of the average bucks we saw.
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