High Percentage Buck Sits: Maximizing Your Potential in Deer Season
Michigan Sportsman 07.25.11
As the years pass by I hunt less and less. Is that true with you? And it’s not that I don’t like to hunt, it’s just that wow…I’ve spent way too much time in the past during times when my chance of success was extremely low. I guess this takes me back to my bass fishing days. Through my teenage years I spent the bulk of my time fishing a 220-acre inland lake in lower MI. I’d fished this lake since I was much younger…played hockey on this lake, water-skied on this lake, swam…well, you get the picture. To say that I knew this lake “like the back of my hand”, was certainly an understatement. My bass fishing was more of a “zip and fish” kind of strategy. Simply, I knew where I thought I had the best chance of catching fish, and I didn’t waste much time in between.
Even though I’m not hitting the waters for bass anymore, the parallels to hunting are incredible! I’m obviously not zipping from woods to woods hoping to shoot a bunch of deer, but instead I plan my hunts for the most successful times of the season, and I don’t waste my time in-between. When I fished for bass in my old honey holes I expected to catch fish within a few casts, and now when I go deer hunting I’m beginning to expect a mature buck within a few chances. Last year with a bow I had a chance on a mature buck 6/24 sits and that’s been a pretty reflective ratio for the last several years. Do I connect every time? Obviously not, because I would have been done hunting in my 2nd or 3rd sit last year. But the point is that I plan for high percentage sits and I think you can too! Another aspect of this strategy is you avoid both stand and hunter “burnout”. Your stands continue to improve the less you hunt them, and so does your drive and passion! I’m going to take you through the course of a typical season and I hope that you will be able to use some of the information to apply to your own monster pursuits.
To read the rest of this article, click here. Jeff Sturgis is a regular contributor for Michigan Sportsman, an Outdoor Hub Network member. You can visit his site at www.whitetailhabitatsolutions.com.
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