I guess I'll be the bad guy here.....I don't see how you could even contemplate giving up a track job when there is an active blood trail that you are following. How many "so called" great hits end up being nothing more than flesh wounds, should we treat our supposed bad shots any differently? I give kudos to your friend for staying the course. I'm glad you found your deer. Congrats on that, but anything less than searching until all options are vanquished is simply unacceptable.
Nice Post!...and really liked the arrow pictures - man you sure couldn't tell that arrow passed through a deer...congrats on the EAB. I wish all of IL was EAB...
No, you're not the bad guy. This is exactly why I posted this. The arrow showed no real signs of being a fatal hit. Yet it was. While I didn't want to give up the trail.. I was willing to if Deb had said 'yes, let's go home'. (I had an idea that I would come back in the morning and search by myself... but in retrospect that would not have panned out as it rained heavily in the morning). I'm pretty anal retentive about my deer hunting.. yet, there isn't a deer out there that I value more than my friendship with Deb. I would have been surprised if Deb had actually, said 'Yeah, let's give it up.' That's why I like her so much. She's even more hardcore than I am. The fact she shrugged off my offer to give up the trail was a great morale booster to me. I can't even begin to describe how bummed out I was about this whole shot and confusing blood trail. Like I had mentioned, I've been lucky about my past shooting. I hadn't missed the last ten or so deer/hogs that I've shot at and they were solid hits with short trails. I started getting the crazy idea that maybe, it was because 'I was good' vs. 'lucky'. I started to think maybe missing, bad hits or long tracks just didn't apply to me anymore. Ha. Then I screw up an 11 yard shot at fawn. That didn't just bring me back down to Earth.. it buried me up to my neck. And, that I even considered walking away from the trail bothers me immensely. Deb actually laughed at me when I told her I thought she might be mad that I was keeping her out too late for her to go hunting in the morning. I knew Kendall wouldn't be able to get up at 3am too... but I can make it up to Kendall. :D Tho' I now owe Deb several lunches.
Total distance the deer traveled after the hit: I'm not sure, maybe around 200 yards? It was super thick stuff, that was hard to walk through and hard to see more than a couple feet in front of you. The blood was obvious when we found it, but we often had to be almost on top of it to see it. So it was very slow going. The slow pace made me think we had gone way farther than we actually had. Did the deer circle or make a 'J'? Not that I can tell, but like I said I was pretty much hunched over trying to peer through the brambles in front of me and didn't pay attention to over all direction. It was so thick my GPS lost signal so I can't even refer to it. She did zigzag back and forth and she definitely stuck to the heaviest cover she could find. It was like trying to follow a rabbit. This was a zone that I've never hunted in before so I'm not at all familiar with it. She never bedded down but she did stand in one spot long enough to bleed a puddle shortly before she collapsed. I shot her at about 5:15 pm. We didn't really start tracking until about 7:30-ish. I don't know when we found her... seemed like it was hours later but maybe it wasn't. (I know we didn't get home until about 11pm) She had cooled down and was getting stiff when we found her. In hind sight it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Follow the blood, get the deer.. but at the time we were all scratching our heads. I never would have thought I would have hit the off side on that shot. I can also say... I'm not too thrilled about ever taking a steep angled broadside shot again. ....and my arrows definitely hit high if use my 20 yard pin at ten yards. I've never had a bow that didn't. ??
Christine, what is your speed? (Curious as it might depict why it hits higher for those with "fast" bows) That said, us guys with longer draws have an advantage over Miss Christine. My 20 yard pin is an inch high at 10 yards but I'd be guess and say that Christine's is much higher. Also, Christine, not that you did anything out of the ordinary but did you bend at the waist or just drop your bow arm or maybe both. Shooting down most have a tendency to drop their bow arm some which will cause high hits.
I think my speed is about 210 fps. Maybe a bit faster.. like 215. I can't remember. I think I had them up to 225 with my other bow which is a few pounds heavier. My arrows are 368 grains. I couldn't tell you if I was twisted up like a pretzel at the time of the shot. But I will say that when I shoot out of the treestand in the yard, I don't shoot any higher than when I'm level with the target. (no matter how crappy my form) Not since I started using a Hindsight. I'm not sure why that makes a difference but it seems too. Maybe it's just because that sight is either lined up, or it's not. ????
Thanks Jeff. And thanks for the extra muzzys. I'll do my best to put them all to good use. (well... that one gooey one I might not mess with. :D )
Yep, one of the reasons I shoot Muzzys: Run some super-hot water into a bowl, squirt some dishwashing liquid in it and let 'em soak for a few hours. Unscrew the trocar tip, dump the old blades out and insert new... Love how simple that process is as opposed to the myriad mechs I've used over the years. Good luck now in getting that buck, Christine!
Thanks for the follow-up to my post Christine, I understand where you're coming from now...And Congrats again!
I just shot a whole bunch of arrows.. some from the ground, some from a tree. I contorted all sorts of ways and if I use my 20 pin dead on at a target 11 yards away, I consistently hit 3" high. 3" would have made a pretty big difference on this particular deer.
Lovin the story. Not sure you could have gotten a better shot and a high angle. Congrats on sticking to the trail and your doe!
Regardless of the terrain, friendship or whatever a good hunting buddy should and will take the goods and the bads when tracking animals like your friend Deb did. Kudo's to her. Back In 1996 one of the guys who used to bear hunt with us shot a bear on the other side of the spine accidentally like you did and caught one lung with one blade with his bear razor broadhead. I never thought I'd see that until that night. We tracked that bear about 400 yards In very thick nasty swamp like stuff. Hardly any blood until the last 20 yards of the trail. We got damn lucky on finding that bear, he thought for sure he just skimmed the back but we all Insisted that were tracking this bear until we run out of blood. His arrow didn't have half the blood yours did, hardly anything actually. One just never knows thats for sure. Great post, hope many learn from this.
On low poundage bows yes there's a big difference between a 10 yard shot and a 20 yard shot. Back In the day when I shot a compound If I remember right It was about a 4 to 6 Inch difference between my 10 and 20 yard pin on where the arrows went. The compounds of today might be different too but that's the way mine was when shooting my 1st compound at 42lbs (Martin Lynx).
