Post by ccwilder3 on Nov 6, 2007 16:12:27 GMT -5
This is something I posted over on AT, the home of "I hit that deer perfect but he got away"
This time of year we have a lot of threads that are about loosing a deer after a perfect shot, or not having a blood trail. Usually the broadhead gets the blame.
Let me lay out what happened on the last deer I killed.
First, my equipment.
Iron Mace at 70lbs, 30”
Speedpro 6.2 arrows with 100 gr Bunker Busters at 336fps.
I have a stand that is in a great bottleneck. The bottleneck is just over 60 yards wide with a 5 yard wide shooting lane all the way a crossed it. It is in a swamp that is a mix of mature and young trees, completely surrounded by 10 year old pine trees that are lashed together by some of the nastiest briars and gotcha vines you have ever seen. The swamp has a large number of oaks that were dropping this year.
The stand faces east with the shooting lane running north and south. The stands a chain on that I can move around on without fear of noise. It is 15 feet high. When I stand to shoot, the arrow would be leaving from around 19 feet up.
Just before sunset but still with plenty of light I had a spike come in thicket on my right. He came straight up the shooting lane to 23 yard. He caught my wind and started getting nervous. I had stood and turned, getting my feet set when the deer first appeared. As soon as he started getting antsy, I drew and waited for him to turn. When he did I mouth bleated, which froze him, and shot for the heart. The shot looked great and had that sound that makes you smile. The deer tore off the way he had come, right back into that wretched thicket. I heard him go down about 30 or 40 yards into the thicket. I set about 10 more minutes, to let myself calm down as much as anything, then went to retrieve him.
There was a very orange twilight that made finding blood vexing. I decided to walk to where I thought I had last heard the deer. I could scarce see 3 yards in that thicket and when I did not immediately find him returned to my stand to wait for full dark so I could use my flash light. After it had gotten dark, I went to my bloody arrow and began tracking. There was no blood for the first 15 yards or so and then a drop here, a drop there for the next 25 yards. And there lay the deer. It wasn’t hard to track the deer but I was surprised that the blood trail wasn’t much better. I’ve been getting blood trails that ranged from good to great so far with the Bunker Busters, so one this sparse surprised me.
It took me about an hour to get him to the skinning rack. I really wanted to get him into some good light to see if I could figure out what had happened. The entry wound was a couple of inches higher than I had aimed and the exit wound was high than the entry wound. The arrow should have exited right behind the elbow; instead it was well above it. You would have thought I had shot the deer from the other side.
This deer had ducked and started to whirl quick enough that the arrow had missed the heart, caught the near side lung a little above center and just barely caught the top of the offside lung. High lung hits like this often do not give good blood trails, regardless of the broadhead.
This is with a fast arrow at fairly close range. Had I been shooting a slower bow, it may well have only gotten one lung or been a complete miss.
This post is not meant to be a fast arrow-slow arrow debate. It is really just information to the many who post wandering why their deer got away. How thing are when you release the arrow and how things are when the arrow gets there may be completely different. You may have executed the perfect shot but the target had moved a little or a lot by the time your arrow got there. The point of impact may have been where you wanted but the exit may not, the orientation of the deer's body changing before impact.
Some broadheads do suck but odds are that the entry and exit were not where they needed to be for a fast kill and easy recovery.
This time of year we have a lot of threads that are about loosing a deer after a perfect shot, or not having a blood trail. Usually the broadhead gets the blame.
Let me lay out what happened on the last deer I killed.
First, my equipment.
Iron Mace at 70lbs, 30”
Speedpro 6.2 arrows with 100 gr Bunker Busters at 336fps.
I have a stand that is in a great bottleneck. The bottleneck is just over 60 yards wide with a 5 yard wide shooting lane all the way a crossed it. It is in a swamp that is a mix of mature and young trees, completely surrounded by 10 year old pine trees that are lashed together by some of the nastiest briars and gotcha vines you have ever seen. The swamp has a large number of oaks that were dropping this year.
The stand faces east with the shooting lane running north and south. The stands a chain on that I can move around on without fear of noise. It is 15 feet high. When I stand to shoot, the arrow would be leaving from around 19 feet up.
Just before sunset but still with plenty of light I had a spike come in thicket on my right. He came straight up the shooting lane to 23 yard. He caught my wind and started getting nervous. I had stood and turned, getting my feet set when the deer first appeared. As soon as he started getting antsy, I drew and waited for him to turn. When he did I mouth bleated, which froze him, and shot for the heart. The shot looked great and had that sound that makes you smile. The deer tore off the way he had come, right back into that wretched thicket. I heard him go down about 30 or 40 yards into the thicket. I set about 10 more minutes, to let myself calm down as much as anything, then went to retrieve him.
There was a very orange twilight that made finding blood vexing. I decided to walk to where I thought I had last heard the deer. I could scarce see 3 yards in that thicket and when I did not immediately find him returned to my stand to wait for full dark so I could use my flash light. After it had gotten dark, I went to my bloody arrow and began tracking. There was no blood for the first 15 yards or so and then a drop here, a drop there for the next 25 yards. And there lay the deer. It wasn’t hard to track the deer but I was surprised that the blood trail wasn’t much better. I’ve been getting blood trails that ranged from good to great so far with the Bunker Busters, so one this sparse surprised me.
It took me about an hour to get him to the skinning rack. I really wanted to get him into some good light to see if I could figure out what had happened. The entry wound was a couple of inches higher than I had aimed and the exit wound was high than the entry wound. The arrow should have exited right behind the elbow; instead it was well above it. You would have thought I had shot the deer from the other side.
This deer had ducked and started to whirl quick enough that the arrow had missed the heart, caught the near side lung a little above center and just barely caught the top of the offside lung. High lung hits like this often do not give good blood trails, regardless of the broadhead.
This is with a fast arrow at fairly close range. Had I been shooting a slower bow, it may well have only gotten one lung or been a complete miss.
This post is not meant to be a fast arrow-slow arrow debate. It is really just information to the many who post wandering why their deer got away. How thing are when you release the arrow and how things are when the arrow gets there may be completely different. You may have executed the perfect shot but the target had moved a little or a lot by the time your arrow got there. The point of impact may have been where you wanted but the exit may not, the orientation of the deer's body changing before impact.
Some broadheads do suck but odds are that the entry and exit were not where they needed to be for a fast kill and easy recovery.
