Scott: Off topic I know but where can you find forecastsfor wind direction?

Rick,

My favorite weather site... click on the five-day forecast to the right. It gives forecasted updates by the hour!

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=ullin%2C+illinois

My favorite hunting area is a "destination" spot(if I understand your definition correctly). Its much better on morning hunts as they travel back from their food sources to bed. Occasionally they will bed on the eastern side so I try my best to be in there before any daylight. I only hunt this area with eastern or south winds, so my hunting is restricted to those times.

Wow....I have no idea how I never came across that site before. Great site........thank you!

Agreed, Coug... the only "destination" hunts I will target is their beds... but -- again, I feel it's got to be later into the season when the big boys become prone to getting back to bed a bit late. Both Don Higgins (author of Hunting Trophy Whitetails In The Real World) and I feel that it's pretty mucha fruitless effort to catch them going back to their beds in early season; they've long been there by sunup.

Nice link.... I never saw this site before either.

Pardon my ignorance.... But I am not sure what your setup is?

I think you are saying you hunt a bedding setup? I do not consider bedding as a destination myself although others may..... But rather areas they hit for short to moderate lengths of timesuch aswater sources, crop fields, oak trees etc...

Greg posted as I was typing. He confirmed my thought on it being a bedding setup.

I hunt bedding setups much like Greg stated for morning hunts.... I much prefer to hunt evening bedding setups for the early season personally.

Is this a trick question?[:-]

I believe that all of my hunts are destination hunts. The deer that I'm hunting are either coming from or going to their destination!!

I trynot to hunt destination spots in the morning, And not that keen on it in the evenings for the same reasons, getting in and out of the stand prime time for them to be there. Deer are consistent browsers and dont have to depend on any paticular food source to get by especially when pressured. SoI spend most of my time trying to bushwhack them somewhere along their to and from destination spots once I have established a pattern,but have also learned to be flexible over the years.
One year I was lucky enough to have a couple of hours of daylight in the morning befor I had to be to work and could leave early and glass one of my hunting spots. Creek bed bottoms farm land (combined corn and standing bean fields)where you could probably see for 2 miles about a 1000 yards deep to the woodline, to make a long story short, I watched a buck right at the crack of daylight, 2 out of 3 days,come out of the woodline, walk a short distance clean out a scrape then disappear back into the woodline and he repeated this process 8 times till he disappeared into a large marsh the creek feed at the end of the been field. I took my stand to work with me the next day (4th) and sat it up where the woods closed in to about 70 yards overlooking one of the scrapes, 26 yards to the scrape, 22 yards to the creek bed behind me in case he tried to slip by. And this is my point, even though I killed the buck the next morning hunting over his scrape, after backtracking him it was plain as the nose on your face he was huntingfor lovers by making his scrapes by major trails ending at destination points!
Its late, or early, I will post more thoughts and some questions on this thread later.

This is how I hunt, as well.