My Craziest Season
Posted By
Bill Winke
at
4/18/2009 12:00:00 AM
Filed under:
journal
If you watched Jerry Maguire you probably remember the moment of inspiration when Jerry rushed to his computer in a blur of energy and wrote up a new proclamation on how his talent agency should do business - fewer clients. Before he went to bed he delivered the proclamation to every office of the agency. Then when he woke up, the higher spiritual moment had passed and he was left with the horror of actually having acted on his crazy idea. Long and short of it, he go fired.
That is what I am going to do for the next month. I am going to publish something every morning for a solid month. Some of it may have nothing to do with hunting, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway, Jerry Maguire style. I hope I don't embarrass myself too badly
My first one: The Craziest Season.
Back in 2002 I was experimenting with ways to keep my scent from getting to deer so I decided to take it to the extreme. I had learned that you can bottle your scent in a ground blind by putting plastic wrap across the windows. So I put up a blind along a well-used trail in the timber. It was a spot I had never been able to hunt before because of swirling winds. I had seen a giant buck in the upper 180s head up that draw a day earlier, prompting me to take this extreme measure.
If you have ever hunted from blinds you know that visibility is not the best when you set them in the timber. Deer get to you and past you before you even see them. So I zipped the top hatch open, thrust my head out fully decked in two Scent-Lok hoods, and zipped it back tight around my neck to seal all the other odors inside. Then I simply stood there looking around with my head poked out of the top of the blind all day. To shoot, I planned to drop back into the blind and shoot through one of the plastic covered windows.
I brushed in the blind so the deer accepted it quickly. Even the very first day I had deer literally coming up to the blind sniffing the branches while my bug-eyed head watched them from just two feet away. I even had one shooter come past, but he wasn't the one I was after. He came through quickly and I may not have been able to shoot even if I had wanted him.
It was quite an experiment. I stayed nice and warm, except my head, but I sure got tired of standing there in one spot for hours. Talk about going stir crazy. I think that experiment lasted about three days before I decided that even a 180 inch buck wasn't worth that agony. I never saw that buck again.
That blind experiment got me to thinking. Why not shrink the blind down so I could wear it in a tree stand and still have all the scent containing advantages. Come back tomorrow morning and I'll tell you about the hair-brained scheme I tried next and how that turned out.
