Well,
I finally did it. I had a place where I could hunt locally, I scouted everything out myself, setup the ground blinds, setup my trail cam, handloaded the bullets, and after everything I got an 8pt buck.
Scouting:
I put my trail camera up in the exact same spot as I did last year and ended up getting a picture of a nice buck at nighttime. This may be the one I ended up shooting, I'm not 100% positive, but it's close.
I used two pop up ground blinds for my father in law and I to each have one and I made sure to put some orange surveyors tape around them since it's hard to see orange inside the blind. In hind sight I wish I'd have put more up but we were lucky that nobody else went out there to hunt this year, so far.
As far as the hunt itself goes Saturday morning we got out there an hour before daylight and were getting rained on pretty heavily. We didn't see anything so I grabbed my trail camera and we left around 10 or 10:30. We were watching TV at the house debating on even going back out there because of the heavy rain and the radar. I checked the trail cam pictures around 2:30 and couldn't believe it when I saw the pictures shown above. The rain stopped and we rushed to get back out there. I jumped a good buck (possibly the one I ended up getting) as I was making it to my blind and he got away without my getting a good chance for a clean shot. My father in law saw two deer just before the sun went down and he shot with his 20 gauge, but cleanly missed. He underestimated how far away they were and I missed being able to take a good shot. That was the end of day one.
This morning we went back out at least an hour before daylight, just enough time to take a little cat nap or two, not that I'd ever do that, but a guy could if he wanted to. Sun came up around 7am and about 7:30 my buck showed up out of nowhere without making a single noise. I saw where he was walking and waited for him to take a few more steps into a spot where I had a clear shot and Bang, flop. He went down on his side right where he got hit. He flopped around on his side like he was trying to get up and I didn't want him to suffer anymore than he had to. I chambered another round in my stainless Puma 20" 44mag and shot him again right in the neck and he never moved again. My rifled is zeroed for 100 yards and I aimed dead center behind the shoulder not thinking to aim lower to compensate, so I hit him higher than I'd have liked to.
Just before field dressing and long after I said a prayer thanking the big guy upstairs for a deer, let alone an 8pt, I stood where he was shot and used a Bushnell laser range finder to get the distance to my blind, it was 60 yards. There was a strange looking bump on the opposite side of where I shot him and it was my bullet. I cut it out first, before field dressing.
I hunted with my Puma 44mag last year and never got an opportunity to use it. This year I was using my handloaded hornady 240gr XTP hollow points. The recovered bullet was cleaned, rinsed, and dried off weighing on my rcbs chargemaster combo. It left the barrel around 1600 - 1700 fps and hit a deer just behind the shoulder 60 yards out and weighed 184.2grs afterwards. That's a pretty good bullet as far as I'm concerned and it did a number on the deer.
I'm pretty happy with the events of today and genuinely hope everyone else hunting for whatever they want have as great of a season as I think I had. It's not over yet, I may go back out after some does.
