I felt like today was going to be the day. We got going early, but the temperature was just shy of 70 when we got out of the vehicle. I was sitting for an hour before daylight.
Sitting next to a water hole in some plantation pines, a few deer made their way to it before daylight. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them drinking. A few minutes later, a buck came down the old road in front of me, but he never made it to the water. He caught my wind and headed back to where he came from.
The rest of the day was uneventful. I sat the entire day and didn’t see a thing. Brian missed a big buck in the same piece of woods. He ricocheted of some branches that he never saw when he released the arrow. It was a dandy of a buck, too. He’s pretty disappointed, but there’s not much you can do when you don’t see the brush in your sight picture when you hit full draw.
The temperature topped out at 76 degrees today. It just won’t let up. Originally, it was supposed to drop tomorrow, but the forecast doesn’t seem to agree. Hopefully, the heat subsides. This has not been one of my better trips. I haven’t seen hardly any deer, and I haven’t seen a racked buck yet. I have a feeling someone will connect tomorrow. Everyone except Dad and I has been doing well and seeing a lot of deer. He and I have had all of our hunts disturbed my other people. I’ve been in my tree well before daylight multiple days and had to shine my light at people as they approached in the darkness. Unfortunately, it didn’t phase any of them, with two of them climbing trees within 40 yards of me and staying there for the first few hours of daylight. It’s getting pretty discouraging. There isn’t much you can do about incidents like that when you encounter them at daybreak and your hunting partner is in the same piece of woods. It’s not like I could’ve picked up and went someplace else. Instead, I sit there and take it on the chin. It hasn’t been fun. That’s the pitfall of hunting on public land. Between OnX Maps and Social Media, public land hunting has increasingly gone downhill at a rapid pace.