I finally shot my first deer with a bow yesterday evening. I shot her at about 20 yards, and as I released, she took a step and I hit her what looked like should be a liver shot, right about the last rib. When it hit I saw the arrow stayed in her and it looked like it only went in about 10 inches. We gave her an hour and we back after dark. We looked for 2 hours and never found the first drop of blood, the arrow or anything. Gonna go back this morning and see what we can do. I'm not blaming the bow or broadhead. I shoot a Bear Charge at about 61 or 62 lbs, a 27 inch arrow and a 100 grain Slick Trick broadhead.
My experiences with liver shots has been that they don't bleed right away. Once you find blood, the blood trail will be ok. If you remember the direction she ran, try to go down that trail.
If your arrow hit at about the last rib and the deer was broadside, you probably didn't hit the liver but instead have a solid gut hit. Gut shot deer can be difficult to impossible to blood trail. Sometimes you just need to start looking for the deer. Often they bed and die near water sources. I've seen where they've crawled in/under some heavy cover before they die and sometimes they're laying in the open. Good luck!
Quartering spine hit, anything else, and you should have blown straight through her. My bet is she'll likely live, and you'll see her again, only a she'll be a little more weary of her surroundings than the last time.
I'm kinda curious why my arrow didnt get better penetration. If my bow doesnt create enough energy for a pass through, should I change broadheads to Rage instead of Slick Tricks? Slick Tricks seem to be good and made for pass through shots and Rage seems to usually not pass through and leave a big entrance hole. Just trying to get some advice and learn from my mistakes. Thanks
stick with the tricks. Rages pass through just fine, just not for your setup! i am guessing you hit bone. thats the only thing i could figure would stop that.
If your arrow isn't flying perfectly straight, you'll lose a lot of energy when you hit the deer and limit you chances of a pass through. Too light of an arrow will limit penetration too. A big cutting diameter head like a rage would just exacerbate the problem, not help it. Do your field points hit in the same spot as your broadheads at 20 yards? 30 yards? How heavy are your arrows?
I've had 2 shops check to make sure my bow is tuned. My arrows seem to fly straight. And yea, my broadheads hit where my field tips hit. Idk what the problem is. Maybe my arrows r too light. They're 250 grain Mutiny arrows at 27 inches. It's what a shop said I should use for my set up. Is that a good arrow?
My draw weight is only 41 lbs and my arrow with broadhead is 368 grains so in my opinion your arrow is too light for your poundage. Momentum is key for good penetration. This is why it's really hard to stop a train rolling along at 3 mph vs a ping pong ball going 30 mph. Still, you should have gone through that doe. You might have hit bone or maybe you hit the paunch and she was full of dense stuff like acorns and leaves??? Also the fact she was moving takes some forward energy away from the arrow. It's just really hard to say what happened. As they say, stuff happens. In the future you may want to look at a heavier arrow. If you're getting good flight now tho' I wouldn't change during this season.
I kinda thought the arrow was a little light but this is my first year of really bowhunting and I figured the bow shop would know what to use. I'm still learning alot. All I've done is rifle hunt for years. So look into maybe using heavier arrows, not changing broadheads? I do have time to practice with new arrows, so I can change if yall think I need to. I won't get a chance to bow hunt again for a couple weeks. Thanks for all the help.
He meant 250 spine not 250 grains. I wouldn't look too much into why you didn't pass through, too many variables. 10" of penetration behind the shoulder and you would have found the doe quickly.
That's you're first mistake. There are some good shops out there that know what they're doing but there are twice as many that don't. I hope you find your deer. Not everyone is a world class shooter. Hopefully you didn't mean that the way it reads.
Absolutely. It doesn't read negatively at all to me. Sounds like he's just trying to reassure the OP that his setup WILL kill a deer.
Your arrows shouldn't be the problem, they should be weighing around 375-380gr I'd guess, and a .400 spine would be just fine for your bow. I think you hit the deer differently than what you remember seeing. Sometimes what we THINK we see and what we REALLY see are two different things altogether. Videos sometimes show us completely different views than what we "thought" we saw when we were there experiencing an event. Look at "instant replay" in football, now apply that thought to hunting. Reasonably thinking, unless you hit moderately heavy bone, that arrow should have blown right through the deer. YOU can tune the bow yourself, it's not that difficult, just takes a little time and patience. THIS LINK: http://www.archerytalk.com/vb/showthread.php?t=539460 is one of the BEST tuning links you'll ever see. It's been viewed over 80,000 times for VERY good reason. If a bow is BH tuned by the person who's going to shoot it, and BH's and FP's have same/similar POI, then the bow is TUNED. And to TUNE a bow, the person who intends on shooting the bow needs to be the person shooting the bow when tuning the bow.
