gelhaargerald
Member
Last time I will write this. If you are looking for a brilliantly written story with proper grammar, punctuation and any sense of coherence then just stop here.
In June of 2022 I was offered to lease a 130 acres of ground. Leasing is not really a thing here in Iowa (yet). It was a guy I worked for and now have bought out. He lives in NE but bought this piece of ground as an investment. If you look at it, it doesn't scream deer hunting. It was 100 acres of crops and 30 acres of CRP but it wasn't in a CRP program so it was free to what I wanted with it. I agree to lease it and set off on figuring out how to do food plots with little equipment. I had a sprayer and a John Deere X540. I killed two 1 acres areas with sound good old round up. Then a few weeks later I killed it again. After that I mowed it, raked it and spread some seeds on it. Now that I had a clear area I threw up some trail cameras.
As we got closer to the hunting season I put up a cheap fabric tower blind (mistake they suck) on one plot and a hay bail blind on the other (they are not much better). We would get occasional pictures of deer and a few smaller bucks but nothing really special. Shockingly the plot didn't take off but the deer did like to hang out in it and eat what ever was sprouting up, not the stuff I planted. The place sets up for gun hunting so it didn't get hunting during the archery season. We didn't hunt first shotgun because I had to be in Columbus OH for work. While there I get this trail camera. He is a ways off but looked nice.
That is the only picture we get of him. In Iowa if you purchase a youth tag it is good for the entire season. Our middle son was 15 and it was his last year so I wanted to get him on it. We got after him a few times but he was not showing up much, and we never saw him or had pictures of him in the day light. He wasn't dead set on only that deer there were a few others that would have been pretty good also, he hadn't killed anything besides a basket rack. Fast forward to January 9. The season ends on the 10th. It was perfect wind and really cold. We got in around 3:00. At 4 ish we see some does walking the fence line 300 yards off. Then his rack appears. Its amazing how fast you can see a big rack right away. They are paralleling our land but on the neighbors. He gets to the corner and they all hop the fence into the ground we are hunting.
At this time a 150" 10 point comes to the pond 136 yards away. I was thinking it was perfect and he would run down and chase him off, nope him and the does jump the fence again back on the neighbors, the smaller buck runs off with them. He was damn near hyperventilating at the time.
A good bit goes by and then some does start to funnel back into the field and into what I would call a foot plot but not really. I put the bino's up and like I mentioned before I could see his rack coming. My son gets the muzzle loader out the window. He makes his way up into the plot. It doesn't take long and he is right at 110 ish yards. I am a big believer that you kill as soon as you can make a lethal shot. To many times animals do weird things. By now my son is calmed down and locked in.
He pulls the hammer back, I have my phone on the deer, poof. The dam primer went off but the powder didn't. The deer look, he turns and whisper WTF? They are kind of alarmed but just standing there. I had another muzzle loader in the blind so it was asses and elbows trying to get the second one up. We were able to get it up and cocked, he needed a few more seconds but they finally bolted. We mustard up the want to get out the next day but we only saw does. We knew he made it through the seasons so that was the only saving grace. Here are some late pictures of him (if I get pictures to post).
In June of 2022 I was offered to lease a 130 acres of ground. Leasing is not really a thing here in Iowa (yet). It was a guy I worked for and now have bought out. He lives in NE but bought this piece of ground as an investment. If you look at it, it doesn't scream deer hunting. It was 100 acres of crops and 30 acres of CRP but it wasn't in a CRP program so it was free to what I wanted with it. I agree to lease it and set off on figuring out how to do food plots with little equipment. I had a sprayer and a John Deere X540. I killed two 1 acres areas with sound good old round up. Then a few weeks later I killed it again. After that I mowed it, raked it and spread some seeds on it. Now that I had a clear area I threw up some trail cameras.
As we got closer to the hunting season I put up a cheap fabric tower blind (mistake they suck) on one plot and a hay bail blind on the other (they are not much better). We would get occasional pictures of deer and a few smaller bucks but nothing really special. Shockingly the plot didn't take off but the deer did like to hang out in it and eat what ever was sprouting up, not the stuff I planted. The place sets up for gun hunting so it didn't get hunting during the archery season. We didn't hunt first shotgun because I had to be in Columbus OH for work. While there I get this trail camera. He is a ways off but looked nice.
That is the only picture we get of him. In Iowa if you purchase a youth tag it is good for the entire season. Our middle son was 15 and it was his last year so I wanted to get him on it. We got after him a few times but he was not showing up much, and we never saw him or had pictures of him in the day light. He wasn't dead set on only that deer there were a few others that would have been pretty good also, he hadn't killed anything besides a basket rack. Fast forward to January 9. The season ends on the 10th. It was perfect wind and really cold. We got in around 3:00. At 4 ish we see some does walking the fence line 300 yards off. Then his rack appears. Its amazing how fast you can see a big rack right away. They are paralleling our land but on the neighbors. He gets to the corner and they all hop the fence into the ground we are hunting.
At this time a 150" 10 point comes to the pond 136 yards away. I was thinking it was perfect and he would run down and chase him off, nope him and the does jump the fence again back on the neighbors, the smaller buck runs off with them. He was damn near hyperventilating at the time.
A good bit goes by and then some does start to funnel back into the field and into what I would call a foot plot but not really. I put the bino's up and like I mentioned before I could see his rack coming. My son gets the muzzle loader out the window. He makes his way up into the plot. It doesn't take long and he is right at 110 ish yards. I am a big believer that you kill as soon as you can make a lethal shot. To many times animals do weird things. By now my son is calmed down and locked in.
He pulls the hammer back, I have my phone on the deer, poof. The dam primer went off but the powder didn't. The deer look, he turns and whisper WTF? They are kind of alarmed but just standing there. I had another muzzle loader in the blind so it was asses and elbows trying to get the second one up. We were able to get it up and cocked, he needed a few more seconds but they finally bolted. We mustard up the want to get out the next day but we only saw does. We knew he made it through the seasons so that was the only saving grace. Here are some late pictures of him (if I get pictures to post).
