HuntingNet.com Forums - My buck this year.

Trying to get a picture on the screen, which "worked", I guess. If you've got a magnifying glass that's my buck this year.

If you've read the thread, "My Biggest Buck So Far", you heard about my buck from '04. This buck is my '05 kill, taken off the same stand. This boy will score about 129 net, 133 gross, dressed weight approx. 180 lbs.

I hunted for 8 straight days, five of them all-day sits on my main stand. I get up at 4 AM, get on stand 30-45 minutes before daylight, sit until dark, then do it again the next day.

Through seven days this year, I had not seen a buck I wanted, although I had seen several nice ones. I passed up five 3 1/2 y.o. whitetail bucks, and three additional nice muleys. I thought I was going to go home empty on Saturday night, 12 Nov. I had an 11-hour drive to get home Sunday so I could work Monday. I decided to get up one more time Sunday morning and sit for just the first two hours of daylight, then start the long drive home. It's good I stuck it out.

About an hour after daylight, I saw a muley doe squirt down a little draw across from my stand, acting like she was being pursued. I looked for a buck to follow, and shortly thereafter a buck did appear, in a parallel draw to the one she came down. I assumed this was the muley buck chasing the doe I had seen.

It took me a couple minutes to see that this buck was in fact a whitetail. (Soon, another nice buck, a muley, would show up behind the doe.) Anyhow, the whitetail coursed down a little line of trees that is the main whitetail funnel under my stand. At the upper end of the tree line, he came out at 310 yards on a fast walk. I took the appropriate hold and touched off a round. He ran 80 yards and fell. Yahoo!

He's an 8-pointer, with a broken-off nub of a G-4 on the left tine. His G-2s go 10 7/8 and 11 2/8". I just got his boiled skull back from the taxidermist today.