Spring Turkey 2009

This is the Tom I took this spring at the Mark's place, Mark is the owner of the place I work at. Thank you Mark for letting me bag this turkey, my first one. It came in about a half hour after we sat in his elevated blind. The first picture was taken right before we cleaned the bird, and the second was taken out at Mark's by Mark.

Growing a beard for hunting?

Everybody knows the old cliche about growing a beard for hunting season. Is it played out though? I don't know, but I'll use any excuse I can to grow a beard. Some guys use this time of year to grow a splotchy creepy beard that would make Joe Dirt embarrassed. Please don't be that guy, if you cannot grow a beard, don't try. Go with a fu man chu mustache or roll with the extremely long sideburns. If you are going to look funny with a beard, do it with some dignity and some character. And to the guys who won't grow a beard but complain that they want to, but their wives or girlfriends won't let them, grow a set. Don't sit on the facial hair sidelines and look on wondering what could be, just go for it. If your wife or girlfriend doesn't like it too bad, it's not like she'll leave you over it. Hopefully not anyways. Strangely my wife prefers me with a beard. The only bad thing about a beard is wearing a ninja mask in my blind, it gets kinda itchy. But these are the sacrifices we make, the bearded brethren. So here we are, just a month from gun hunting season, time to start growing those beards guys. I'm already three weeks into mine, and lovin it.

Ronald

St. Croix River bottom bucks.

This is my first deer with a bow, a nubbin buck, taken in the St. Croix River bottoms by our cabin.

This is my father, Ron, with a nice 8 pointer taken from the same tree a couple years before, three months after open heart surgery.

Doe hunt only...

I know they want hunters to take does, which I have done already, but do they really have to dedicate a whole weekend to it? I was really looking forward to hunting some cooler weather this weekend until I found out it was a doe only hunting weekend, and they let gun hunters go after them this weekend too. So not only would I have to shoot a doe (again) I would have to wear blaze orange while bow hunting. Not going to happen, I'll gladly take another doe, but it's going to be after the rut is finished. I don't want to complain to much about it, but it does kind of grind my gears.

Yesterday I set my blind back up along the corn field where I have been seeing some regular activity. I saw two does on the field that night and four deer on there the Sunday before. I am back into the corn a little bit so I have a ten yard shot to the edge of the corn and about a fifteen or twenty yard shot to where the heavy tracks are. It was raining most of the time I was there the other night, so there wasn't a whole lot of activity. Monday night is looking like the next time I'll be out there now. If I can find the time, I'll post some pictures of past deer I've harvested in the coming week, as well as some my dad has taken.

Thanks for reading.
Ronald

Getting back into the swing of things. Fall 2008.

This is my second season of bow hunting since I’ve gotten back into the sport. I hunted a lot from age twelve to sixteen, but got burnt out on it. It’s all we did most weekends in the fall and I loved doing it until I started to fall in love with the same thing most guys at that age did: the opposite sex. I was sidelined chasing girls for a couple years and only gun hunted a couple of times from age eighteen to twenty five. Two years ago I went out gun hunting again and decided that bow hunting was always more fun than gun hunting was and gave it another go. Unfortunately I had since outgrown my bow and had to get new equipment.

Luckily my dad is the biggest sportsman I’ve ever known and was more than glad to get me back into the swing of things. Hunting is a bond that has always been huge in my family. My grandfather hunts, as does my father, uncle and brother. We have been hunting together since my brother and I were old enough. My wife and I were both given bows as birthday/Christmas presents and joined archery league at the Willow River Rod and Gun Club in New Richmond, WI. After a summer of getting back into the swing of things, practicing every week and really focusing on archery it was time to get back out into the woods.

One of the things that turned me away from hunting the first time around was the fact that I had wounded two or three deer and didn’t find them with my old bow. Now my back then my bow was a lot less forgiving as far as arrow speed and the broad heads I used. I used to use a two blade broad head. To be fair, they weren’t terrible shots but it rained one time and snowed another and to find a deer in the clearings up north in the rain or snow is almost impossible. Back in the day, I was using finger tabs, which I was pretty constant with and I was going to use again, until my dad made me try a release and it helped out a lot with staying consistent after a long absence. Now things had changed, I was shooting a much faster bow with some deadly three blade broad heads.

The first time I went out hunting last year I sat in my brother’s stand along a soy bean field by the Apple River. After watching some turkeys run by my stand for a while, I saw my first deer come in. I had forgotten how much your heart starts pumping and the adrenaline rush you get. And it was only a fawn. A couple of small does came and went and then a nice size doe came in. The doe got spooked and ran off and about ten minutes later a nice little fork buck came in. Having never hunted there and not quite knowing the yardage I waited cautiously as he came in. I had a range finder with but didn’t want to scare the deer away. I had him stop about twenty yards away just under a branch. I pulled back and shot and missed over his back. It was a combo of misjudging yardage and the deer bounding down a little. Well, even though I missed, I was pumped about being back in the woods.

I didn’t get back out for another month or so and we headed up to the cabin to hunt the St. Croix River bottoms to hunt the rut. We got up and headed out to our stands at about five or six in the morning. About an hour after we sat down, I had a doe come in but stayed about sixty yards out. This is too far of a shot to take for me. She hung around for a while but never came in closer than that. About a half hour after she left, I was sitting there and a deer ran in and was almost underneath my stand. I stood up waited about ten seconds for the deer to walk ahead for a shot, which seemed like ten minutes, and drew back. I shot what I thought was a doe at about a ten yards; it barely even noticed the arrow pass though. It flinched, took a couple of steps and it finally noticed what had happened. My first deer harvested with a bow was a nubbin buck that ran forty yards and expired. I had shot some deer with a gun, but never quite had the rush that this deer had after shooting him with my bow. The arrow ended up going through both lungs and sealed the deal. The seed had been planted, and I was hooked once again.

I want to say thank you to my family for getting me back into the sport. Special thanks to Ron (dad), Andy (brother), Rick (uncle), and August (grandfather), Breanna (sister), Sara (wife) for pushing me to hunt again. And thanks to you for checking out this blog.

Coming soon: my late season doe story, my doe story from this season and some trail cam pics.

Bowhunting is upon us.

Putting a bunch of hunting stuff on my site Brewcrew365.com didn't feel right so this is going to be my new spot to post about hunting and the outdoors. I plan on putting some trail cam pictures up, re-living some past hunts and posting how this season goes. So far I have harvested a nice doe and I'll post more on that later. Check back often.