Ready For Archery Season!

I can almost feel the cool breeze against my face and smell the clean crisp air as I think about sitting in a tree stand overlooking an overgrown clear-cut, crisscrossed with deer trails on my Georgia hunting lease. But before I experience cool breezes over big clear-cuts I will first have to earn the right of passage with sweaty-butt sits in the mosquito infested creek bottoms. Yeah, I'm talking about archery season.

It's almost here and I couldn't be more ready! True it's hot, the mosquitoes are terrible and the deer don't really move during daylight hours; but it's hunting season! It's the start of something great! Sure, I usually come home empty handed but I will never succeed if I don't keep trying. This time next week, Lord willing, I'll be sitting in a lock-on with my Therma-cell purring, hoping a deer comes wandering through a thick creek bottom on my little 60 acre lease in South Georgia.

Since the deer don't move much at all during daylight hours in September where I hunt, I'm planning on sticking to a really thick area along a creek bottom. I've never hunted this area of the lease, actually never even explored it in the six years I've had the property. It wasn't till turkey season that I hacked a path into the creek bottom and hung a lock on. As I was screwing in steps, a big bodied buck came walking right to my tree at 1 p.m. in the afternoon. It's one of those spots that is so hard to get to that people just haven't set foot there in years. I'm hoping to catch a deer unawares and have an opportunity to try out my new T3 broad-heads.

Last year's trail cam pics on small lease

I did get a chance to visit the property last week by way of a detour on my family vacation to North Georgia. While my wife and kids waited in the mini-van, I quickly filled my two feeders located in areas I will be gun hunting later in the season and set up a couple trail cams. I'm very interested to see what shows up. Last year we had about five bucks frequenting the feeders and two of them were monsters. The biggest was a heavy ten point that broke off his right main beam in front of his G2 early in the season. The second was a tall main frame eight with split G2's. I know the big ten survived the season because one of the farm workers found his shed antler in the Spring. Besides the two big boys, there were two young seven pointers, one of which was very wide and also a fork buck. I'm hoping to catch these guys on camera and see how they have progressed.

I have been shooting my Matthews Switchback XT a lot the past few days and I think I've scraped off all the rust! I picked up some new arrows and broad-heads at the archery shop and a jumbo size Therma-cell refill pack and cleared out the light tags in my local Wal-Mart. Just one more week of work before I meet up with my brother Jacob and head up to Georgia to start the season off! Stay tuned as I have a feeling it's going to be a killer year!