BUCKS BY BOAT

The Truism for Taking Big Bucks or Living a Trophy Life

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.

Let's face the fact that taking a boat, putting it in a stream before daylight, paddling or motoring to remote hunting sites, coming back after the hunt and then having to load all that gear back up after dark before you can return home presents a major hassle. Having to leave camp an hour or two before other hunters do to reach your put-in place inconveniences hunters. That's why most hunters view the idea of boat hunting for bucks as more work and trouble than they want to go through to attempt to bag a big buck. But this tactic regularly produces more big bucks than conventional methods of deer hunting. Those who put out the most effort to outthink, outwork and outhunt others consistently take more big bucks than the hunters who always do what they've always done, also true of life.

I've found that I often can best test a new deer-hunting tactic by listening to the reaction of my friends when I mention it. Often you'll hear, "Well, that's way too much trouble to try to take a buck." Or, "Count me out if you're going to get up two hours before everyone else and come in an hour later than everyone else does." Or, "I'd rather be hunting than paddling." Generally the more skepticism you encounter, the more likely that your idea will produce a big buck. Older-age-class bucks already know when and where almost every hunter on the property will hunt. Deer do a far-better job of patterning hunters than hunters do of patterning deer. Older-age-class bucks have a PhD in hunter dodging. That's why they often die of old age unless they do something really stupid during the rut. Probably if water runs through the land you hunt, no one has used a boat or a canoe to get to a hunting site by taking one of those water routes. If you prefer to hunt with a bow, you may not find even one person who has used a boat to get to his stand site. Since a bowhunter primarily hunts by himself, the idea of loading and unloading a canoe by himself, paddling or motoring downstream and then having to make the return trip alone, possibly in the dark, represents more hassle than anyone wants to attempt.

However, one of the best hunters I've ever met, Dr. Keith Causey, a wildlife biologist who has dedicated his life to studying the white-tailed deer, consistently uses a system like this to take big bucks. "I let everyone in my hunting club pick the stands he wants to hunt from, and then once all the other hunters have picked their hunting sites, I'll choose a spot to hunt from the area that's left that no one wants to hunt. From my research and years in the woods, I know that mature bucks have to live in unhunted areas if they want to survive on any hunting lands."

To use Causey's philosophy, obtain a map of the region you want to hunt. Look at how waterways pass through your hunting area to pinpoint isolated hunting sites where no one hunts, because you only can reach these areas by boat. And no one wants to go through the hassle of putting in a boat and navigating a waterway just to go deer hunting. Circle these locations on your map. Decide to use a boat to get to these remote sites. This season this information will give you the opportunity to bag the biggest buck on your hunting property - a buck that more than likely no one else ever has seen before nor ever will see until you hang him on the meat pole.