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Achery Practice
Practice for game Hi welcome to the Hunting Channel Online’s Tip of the week sponsored by The Whitetail blueprint.com I am your Host John Stallone. For the next 3 weeks we are going talk about practicing for the game. I am always preaching about practicing life-like scenarios.
It is so important to practice situations that you might be faced with during your hunt. The year leading up to my ’07 deer season, I was spending most of my practicing hours on
spot and stalk type hunting because I was releasing my first book Secrets of Hunting Western Game and we were gonna be doing some shows and videos to support the book and give some video tips that went hand in hand with the book, etc. During all of this, I did not shoot one arrow from a tree stand
that whole year. My first deer trip was in Illinois and the very first morning on stand I had an absolute monster stop right in front of me, quartering away at 19 yards; this was 180 inches of pure stud. I was a little shaky and had a bit of the fever but not enough to throw me off. I let the arrow fly and it sailed harmlessly over the brute’s back, I chalked it up to buck fever. The next morning I decided
to shoot a doe to get the first hunt jitters out, she was broad side at 20 yards. Thump! said the arrow as it hit the dirt on the other side of the doe. Wow, I was baffled, I shot my Mathews at the range at the lodge and I was hitting tic tacs at 60 yards but I couldn’t shoot a 300 pound deer at 30? What was going on
here? It wasn’t buck fever because I missed the doe too. It is because I had been shooting at 60-80 yards from the ground, kneeling, sitting, and every which way you could think but not from a tree stand. I had trained myself so well for my western game hunts that my muscle memory would not allow me to
shoot the way I needed to from the stand. With some mental adjustments I was able to score a
turkey at 45 yards and a doe at 19. As for the buck, I never did get an opportunity at that big buck again and because he was burned in my skull I would not except the 10 other 130” deer that passed within range. Moral of the story is practice for the hunt, standing 20 yards away from a big target shooting field points is not gonna help you get prepared to shoot a deer from 20 feet up and out 30 yards with a broad head. So next week and the week after we are going to give you some drills to do to get ready for your hunts. Make sure you tune in next week and remember for and in dept look at preparing for your hunt check out http://www.thewhitetailblueprint.com an pick up your copy today…..thanks for joining us we’ll see you out in the field.