BUCKS BY BOAT

Why Bucks Will Be Where You and Your Boat Are

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.

Like many other hunters, I believe that when older-age-class deer hear pickup trucks, automobiles and ATVs, they know something's up, and they'll retreat to remote locations. If you get to those out-of-the-way locations before the bucks do, you can take more big bucks than the average hunters do, especially on public lands and hunting-club lands where large numbers of people hunt. The largest number of deer hunters hunt within 1/4-mile of where they enter the woods. A smaller percentage hunt within 1/8-mile of where they leave their vehicles, and a very small number of hunters will hunt more than a mile from their vehicles. Most hunters ...

* can't or won't navigate to their stand sites before daylight or after dark,
* don't like to leave camp more than an hour before daylight to get anywhere in the woods,
* believe that the further they go into the woods, the more difficulty they'll have trying to bring a big deer out of the woods if they take trophy deer and
* can't read a compass and or a topo map and don't know how to navigate with a hand-held GPS receiver.

Therefore, most deer hunters never go willingly into remote areas where they'll have the best opportunities to bag big bucks and the fewest chances of seeing other hunters in the areas they're hunting. Put quite simply, the average deer hunter has a problem with laziness and a fear of getting lost in the woods. I can say this, because in my early days of hunting, the picture I've just painted described myself. However, with the new technology and navigation available to the deer hunter with a hand-held GPS, any outdoorsman can go almost anywhere he or she wants to either by day or by night. By our putting forth more effort than many hunters, we can find and take more big bucks than average hunters do.

TOMORROW: HOW TO FIND WATERWAYS TO HUNT