We arrived early enough at camp Friday to have time to unpack and get organized, I had spent the day Tuesday up there scouting and placing a couple of new stands and Friday's wind was perfect for one of them right on the south fence line. I made my way to that one while Andrea headed off to her ladder stand. That ladder stand is likely in the best location on the property but more on her later...
I was quite happy with the setup of my new stand location, now for the deer to cooperate...sure enough two does showed up about 20 minutes before last light...on the wrong side of the fence, the large one was very curious, she could tell something was up n the tree but not what, she spent about 4 minutes walking back and forth sniffing, trying real hard to figure something out. After a bit her caution overcame her curiosity and she headed back south away from me but 5 minutes later she came back down the trail on my side of the fence. She was acting very cautious but not jumpy. She walked right down toward me but instead of heading North up the trail where I was set up to shoot her she crawled under a scrub oak and looked right at me for a minute trying to figure me out. She then backed out and started down the fence line to the east - I had not cleared the shooting lane over there but I knew I was going to busted if she got dead down wind so I decided to try and thread and arrow through the oak branches...no luck, it deflected down and was a clean miss, scaring both deer off from my area...that was the height of my weekend.
Andrea was much more organized this time and spooked a deer trying to get into her stand, nothing more was seen until end of legal light, as she was climbing down a real nice doe and 2 small ones came out...there was Andrea stuck on her ladder waiting for the deer to move on so she did not spook them...something was said about a cramp in a sensitive rear region LOL. Saturday morning was a bust but Saturday afternoon she took Noah as hers is the double ladder stand. They were thoroughly entertained as they had two button bucks playing around in front of them for over 10 minutes. They also had 2 other does pass over the ridge just to the west of the stand, she thought they would be headed right down to me at another location I had set up but I never seen a thing..
So another fun and eventful weekend at the Ingalls family hunt camp has come and gone, no fresh venison on the table yet but we have lots of reason to be optimistic...
The plan for the next 5 weekends will be to leave for camp lunch time on Friday, meaning Andrea has to take the afternoon off and Noah has to miss school, heartbreaking for both of them I am sure.
For those wondering why Andrea did not shoot a nice tender juicy young buck for our table please scroll down...and then read my closing comments
as you can see she has a more interesting buck on her mind than a mere button buck. When I said earlier she was in a prime location, I put new batteries in the camera located at her stand 2 pm Tuesday, when she pulled the card at 11am this (Sunday) morning there was over 300 pictures...my best calculation so far we have encountered or photographed, the buck pictured above, a 6 pointer, a 4 pointer a forkhorn and 2 button bucks, a large solitary doe, a large doe with 2 fawns, a large doe with one fawn and possibly one other. We also have seen two others on the DUL property within 150 yards of our camp.
No comments:
Post a Comment