Arrowbender wrote:Congrats on the Deer!
So..... 1st impression of the metro hunt?
I have hunted the tri-county park hunt up at Crow-Hassan several times and enjoyed it more than the Camp Ripley experience; although the trophy potential is very biased up north. (C-H hunt 4 or 5 times, Ripley 6 or 7 times)
It has been announced that the County park hunts are going to be ran by the Metro area Bowhunter club (forget the acronym?) and it sounds very much micro managed to me.
Can you expand on your 1st experience and how you plan to go forward.
It sounds like you had a great day of action, and that is always fun.
How was the coordinator, team members etc..?
Feel free to PM if your reply needs to get colorful!
Thank You
So based on previous discussions with people about the hunts, I went into it with an open mind. I told myself "Do it their way, don't think you know how to hunt it better than a coordinator who's seen how deer move there for years, and don't get frustrated over things you can't control. Worst case I don't see anything, which is a likely possibility if I am hunting public in the middle of October anyway."
My coordinator was a really nice, down to earth guy. He was helpful in telling us what to expect, and followed all the rules, but didn't try to micro manage us too much. Had the type of personality that you could just sit and chat deer hunting for hours. I can definitely see how having a bad coordinator would make for a worse overall experience.
Basically, when you're drawn, you go to an orientation meeting for a particular city. There you sit through a long and somewhat boring presentation about all the rules, and watch a shot placement DVD. Then you break into small groups - your specific group and coordinator. They pull out an aerial map subdivided with areas. They go down the list, and each person gets to choose an area. The day before the hunt, everyone meets to hang stands. The coordinator was helpful in trying to give guys specific areas or even trees based on past years. I was nervous about scenting up the area, but I later found out the deer have a very high tolerance for human scent.
Each morning, everyone meets, signs in, and then heads out to the woods. They want you to either hunt all day or at least sit for 2-3 hours so everyone gets a quiet, undisturbed chance for movement. When you leave, be it mid morning or end of the day, you need to sign out, write down number of deer seen, shots taken, deer hit, deer recovered, etc. In addition, you have to text the coordinator each time you take a shot. They have penalties for unrecovered deer, and people are packed in so close it would be really hard to get away with anything. When you kill one, the coordinator came and offered assistance dragging, and they also need to make sure you took a reasonable, high percentage shot. This is where I imagine some coordinators are stricter than others as far as "congrats, nice shot" or "you shot that deer at 22 yards, that's too far" etc.
There is a lot of luck involved. You can pick a tree within your area, and move it to better adjust to movement, but when deer move, they are often seen by more than one hunter. The guys around me all saw the same circuit of bucks making their rounds throughout the day. There's a good chance someone could kill a deer that would have eventually made it past your stand. It's one of those things that you can't get frustrated over, and surely depends a lot on terrain and hunter density. One other thing is that since you're all in a group, you can party hunt. So if one guy bought a bazillion bonus antlerless tags, they can be shared.
Overall I liked the experience the first weekend. Ours was antlerless only, with the mid-November hunt being either sex, but some of the hunts are either sex both weekends. At the very least, it's an opportunity to put some meat in the freezer outside of the rut without burning bridges at some of your other spots.
