BUCKS BY BOAT

Pre-Season Scouting

Editor's Note: When you hunt with a boat, you can reach remote areas where other hunters don't hunt, leave little or no human odor as you go to your stand site and have a quick, easy and efficient way of getting any buck you take out of the woods without much dragging. If you decide to hunt using a boat or a canoe, you drastically can increase your odds for finding more bucks and for taking bigger bucks each season. You also can enter the woods silently.

Scout a waterway-hunting site either just after the hunting season or several weeks before it starts for the most success. But even scouting during the season can pay big-buck dividends for you. Often you'll locate creek crossings and trails on the edge of the water. But, more often than not you'll have to stop occasionally, get out on the bank and look for feeding spots, bedding sites and trails. Generally you'll discover a deer trail within 100 yards of where you leave your boat. Waterways usually have rich soils and an abundance of highly-nutritious natural foods as well as thick-cover areas where the deer can bed and hide. You may want to scout a region for 45 minutes to an hour, climb back in your canoe or johnboat and then move to another area to scout. Each time I find a location with plenty of deer sign that I want to hunt, I'll mark the tree where I want to hang my tree stand as well as the point on the bank where I want to land my boat. Also while I'm going down the waterway, I'll mark shallow-water areas, rapids, trees laying across the creek, boulders out in the creek and any other obstacles that I may encounter.

When I complete my scouting, I have my information stored in my hand-held GPS receiver. I know what I'll encounter along the stream or creek I've decided to use as transport to my hunting site, have several hunting sites marked as waypoints and the exact tree identified where I want to put up my tree stand when I reach that place. I've also usually stuck two Bright Eyes thumb tacks into the tree so that when I get to my tree stand site before daylight, I quickly and easily can identify the tree where I've planned to hang my tree stand. With a hand-held GPS receiver, like my Magellan SporTrac Pro, I can put a message at each waypoint to tell myself why I need to hunt each stand site and tell the wind direction I need to hunt each. Even before the season comes in or goes out, I've got a very detailed map of how to get to my hunting locations by water. I also know the distance from each stand site from my put-in point and my take-out point.

On some bodies of water with slow-moving, deep water, you may can motor down to your hunting site and motor back to where you've left your vehicle. I don't believe that the sound of an outboard motor or a trolling motor spooks deer like the sound of a 4-wheeler does, especially if you plan to hunt along a waterway where fisherman regularly use outboard motors. Although you may find johnboats and motors heavy, the new lightweight two-man fishing boats that you easily can put in the back of a pickup truck or on top of the car or a canoe fit water hunting for deer.

TOMORROW: CANOEING