It is 11/29/11 and we, that is Morgan, Charlie and I have hunted for the first 3 weekends in November at this new lease. I have not seen anything to shoot at, Morgan has seen a few small bucks with nothing in range and Charlie was sitting in the stand and had a little 6 chasing a doe come through his area on the third weekend.  We did see one good buck on the tc’s in the swamp area.

I took a break from hunting the Thanksgiving weekend so that we could do some stuff around the house and I was getting to be a little tired from going out of town every weekend. Me and Morgan have been gone 5 out of the last 6 weekends before Thanksgiving.

I have tried to pattern the rut by reading different posts and I think it is around 11/10/11, which also happens to be the Harvest Moon. Now, for those that don’t know, the Harvest Moon is the 2^nd full moon after the fall equinox and many believe that is the moon that triggers the does to go into estrus.

Deer hunters believe many things and many believe the cold weather triggers the rut, I am not of this camp. I believe it is the amount of daylight combined with the light from the full moon that does this. This is a constant, it is always there year after year, the cold is not. Well some may say that the clouds can throw this theory out the window, but I say when it is cloudy during the day we can see without a flashlight and when it is cloudy during the night of the full moon you can tell there is some light in the sky.

Now we have 7 trail cam's out and there is a lot of anticipation to see what we have on there. A person can spend hours dissecting all the pics on these cams, it seems as though it can be as fun as hunting almost, just another element to the hunt.

Grayson County lease









  Charlie found a lease up in Grayson county with these 2 other guys. It is 500 acs. the majority of the property is pasture, it is split down the center from east to west with a blacktop road which it drains from the road to the north and south, there is a creek at the bottom of the north end that is part of the property line and there is also one down on the south end but I haven't made it down into that area yet.
This past weekend we put out Trail Cams (tc) when we were not hunting, we put out six and they are the ones that have the white pins.
Hunting up here in Grayson County is a lot tuffer than when we were down in Lampasas, down there there was a deer behind every bush it seemed like. Me and Morgan would see at least 6 deer and up to 10 deer a time when we gun hunted out of our blind. I told Morgan that he had been spoiled all these years from getting to hunt down there. but he got to shoot some deer and see what all was involved in a hill country lease.




  

The Crockett Hunt Part 2

We rolled out of Rockwall around 3pm, I had taken off a half a day to load stuff, and since no one was going to be home that weekend I had to pull Morgan out of school because I am not going to leave a teenager home alone.

We got down to the campsite a little after 7pm. When we got into the forest we drove down some roads that we have never been down before and got a little twisted around but I had a new app on my phone that was a topo map and we did ok. The smart phones are awesome when they are loaded with the app's that make life a little easier.

 

We slept in Saturday morning as we were looking for a new hunting site, so after we got up we went scouting for a spot. I had hunted in a spot last year but could not find it until Joe showed me where it was. It is loaded with acorns so we set up there to hunt. We hunted there Saturday afternoon and did not see anything. We feel like this will be a good spot . Last year there were scrapes all around it, but a fire had been there and all the small tree's used in the scrapes were gone, so we will have to do some more recon in the area.


Sunday morning around 4:45am the storm came in, I had woke up and heard the thunder so I went and got my phone from charging in the truck and pulled up the weather app. There was a big storm headed our way. Morgan woke up and asked about the storm so I gave everybody a weather report, and told Morgan that all we had to worry about was getting hit by lightning or a tree falling on us. The tree's were fairly small and the wind was blowing from the northwest  and the tree's did not appear to be affected by the wind, now the one's across the street did not have this look, they were leaning into the neighbors camp, but nothing happened. Sitting in a tent during a thunderstorm gives a person an appreciation for a home, the thunder is louder and the lightning is brighter. Needless to say we did not go out this morning , I went back to sleep and awoke around 8:00am and it was drizzling so we went to our hunting site talked about things and decided to get our stands and head back to camp and roll up things for the ride home.

We went home by way of I45, it is 52 miles from camp to the highway and 194 miles to the house. We drove the rural route going down it was a little bit longer of a drive but 20 miles shorter, a person can make pretty good time until they get behind the slow movers, now I drive 65 mph in the 70 mph to save gas so I don't consider myself a speeder by any means , but these folks were going 50 mph in a 70 mph, 2 lane road.

The Crockett Hunt



Morgan and Joe at camp.



Don't leave the door open or bugs will invade.



 

Our camp

 




Our camp again

















Me, Morgan and Joe left to go to  Crockett around 1:30 pm Thursday 06, 2011 and Willie came down Friday. It was Morgan's first time to hunt down there. We got down there around 5:30 and got our camp set up bu 6:30 and then went off to our area's where we were going to hunt. Our tent is the blue one, we have plenty of room  for us and all our gear.

 Morgan set up by a water hole in a pop up, this is where Charlie killed his doe the first time he hunted down there. I waited til the next morning to find a place as it was dark after we located his hunt area. I went about a 1/2 mile down in the woods and found me a pretty good tree to hunt out of (I use a climber). I had found some acorns so I thought it would be a good place to hunt, as there were lots of oak tree's, turns out that the only acorns in the area were where my tree was ( I didn't find this out til after the Sunday am  hunt when I scouted more of the area). I will hunt here in the future as there are 2 creeks converging and all the acorn tree's, kinda of a bottom area.

There are a lot of place's to hunt, so it can get to be somewhat overwhelming sometime's. The best thing to do is find the acorn's, they need to be white oak acorn if you can find them as the deer like them better. Then after you find the food source you have to find a good tree to hunt out of if you are using a climber if not then a good place for a pop up, which can be hit or miss as it is so dry there is not a well defined trail to set up on.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

We will go back on the weekend of the 10-21-11 and see what we can do. Joe got a doe last week, so congrats to him. Hopefully it will not be in the high 80's this week.

Morgan and Joe cooking breakfast.

                                                                                                                                                                                A big part of going to Crockett is the camping  and eating at camp. This year due to the drought campfires are not allowed nor are charcoal grills. We had a propane grill and Willie picked up a propane grill at a garage sale.

The Drought of 2011

These are the boat ramps in Rockwall off of 66, they are usually pretty busy, but not today.We got a little bit of rain last night, but Lake Ray Hubbard is 5.5 ft low and it will take a lot of rain to bring it back up to normal pool. You can pretty much walk around the whole lake along the newly created mud beach. My friend has found all kinds of things in the mud, things are showing up that have been covered for 30 years

Moving the Tower part 2

This will be the second year that we have been off the lease and when I first found out that we were off it was a really sad thing. I was sad for the loss and I was sad that Morgan was not going to get to enjoy it anymore. I had watched him grow from a little boy who would chatter up a storm while we played tic-tac-toe in the blind to a young man who was telling me to be quiet. He had shot several deer, I had already decided that he could do all the shooting, give him some fond memories to carry with him, and his last buck was a nice one. And I had planned on letting him do all the driving around the lease. Yes , it is very sad, but life goes on and so must I.

We had left our tripods, a feeder and the tower down there as I was hoping to get on a lease in Coleman Co. with my friend Robert but he had to get off of his lease. Charlie and Morgan and I went down to Lampasas Labor day weekend and picked up our things. I had borrowed a 16' flatbed trailer to load everything on. Taking the tower apart was not as bad as one might think but it did take us 3 hours and there was some rust we had to deal with. After it was dismantled and loaded into the trailer we picked up the tripods and the feeder.

 We left there around 1:30pm and stopped at the Dutchman's place, which is just north of Hamilton, and got a Ruben. We then drove to Whitesboro,  which is about 20 miles west of Sherman to a little place we got on, it is in Grayson County and is a bow hunting only, because Grayson is a bow hunting only county. It was a long drive 535 miles, we left Rockwall at 4:45 am Saturday, picked up Charlie and left his house at 5:30 got to Lampasas around 9:00 am.  and made it to Grayson around 6:30. We set up 2 tripods and put the other one out but did not set it up because we ran out of daylight.

We are planning to go back up to Sherman this Sunday and put out 2 feeders and another tripod that is at Charlie's house.

Moving the Tower part 1

I set the tower up in 1993, the second year that I got on the lease to hunt. I kind of married into the lease, by that I mean that my father-in-law was on it for 20 years before I got on it. When I got on it there was Buddy Vass, Micky Vass (son to Buddy) and my father-in-law, I took my f-i-l's spot. There were 3 paying guns, your immediate family could hunt any time and after Thanksgiving we could bring guests down, which I did. In fact this is how I met Charlie, my sister worked for a guy who had never been deer hunting and asked if I would take him, that was in the 94-95 season, I think that introducing anybody to the sport is a good thing. We have since remained friends for 16 years or so.  There was a total of three lease's involved and Buddy got his whole family down there with him. After a time the big lease got sold and the lease to the east went up and that's when they started scurrying around like rats. Several folks had to get off and Charlie was one of them, then the next year I was told that they wanted to make it a family lease as their was just room for 3 hunters, Henry, Micky and Dart (Buddy's wife) Buddy had died the previous year.

Now I think there was some smelly stuff going on. I had kept my mouth shut about a lot of things that were not right, because I loved to hunt down there.  The place where my stand was located was on top of a hill at the nw corner of the property and behind me (west) were ceder thickets, (on another next lease), this was the bedding area, to the south was a little funnel in the trees where the deer would move through to the ceders in the am, and the tin barn,(a little storage shed that was  Buddy's blind) and beyond was the road and my f-i-l's old blind.



187 acs inside the blue.



 

Dart's 8 pt.

There was 187 acre's where we hunted, we always saw deer and we always killed a few. This was the only place where Morgan had ever hunted up until last year, and he was really spoiled, but he will learn and get used to hunting different places and hunting out of ladder blinds, pop up's, tripods and climbers. I am really glad he got a chance to see all the deer and shoot the deer that he did.