After this past weekend me and a couple buddies have logged just over 100hrs scouting the new club and still have a good bit to do. Good news is that we are on the home stretch and I think we are sitting on some of the better spots on the property now. We started last February and picked things back up in late June. Hopefully history repeats itself and hard work pays off.

Dang. So what all are you doing? Walking around and finding new spots? Do you ever sit and see what comes through?

Sounds like you're just walking over every inch of your place right before the season starts

We joined this club last year and did pretty good with what little scouting we were able to get done prior to season coming in. We took four nice 8pts and two nice 7pts. We knew there was room for improvement and a lot of potential if we would put in the time and effort. So we started in February putting some good foot hours in looking at spots that perked our interest in the season since we arent allowed to do any scouting during deer season. We ran a group of trail cams all the way into Turkey season to get a better idea of what the areas held. Came back up in the end of June and started putting our cams on mineral sites and rotated almost ten cameras from June through September on different feeding locations to see which areas were holding the better bucks. During that time we were fine tuning some of our existing setups and trimming shooting lanes as well. That time of the year was when we put in a majority of the man hours. It was not uncommon for us to start out at daylight and still be out til after midnight retrieving cameras and maintaining feeding sites. Seems like we were up there pretty much every weekend during the summer. After narrowing down the better locations, we came in and started hanging lock-ons in those areas on in the end of August and Labor Day weekend. Wanted a majority of our stands hung by Sept 1. If we had good bucks on a specific location we would hang a stand and pullEd out the cameras and will not go back until we decide its the right time to hunt it. Usually don't hang a stand unless we know there is a good buck in the area. We had almost 20 stands to put up and now we are down to the last five or so. Hard work and scouting usually pays off and if it doesn't, well we still had a good time fighting the heat, snakes and chiggers.

* And yes our President does not mind because we do more than our fair share of club work days and we are always eager to help out with whatever he needs done before we do any scouting.

First I would like to congratulate you on your persistence and drive, youth is a blessed time. However, I feel as if I need to warn you of what probably will happen. The old members are going to get jealous of yalls success, it happens at most clubs. I just hope your club has a good honest president and does not cave to the jealous club members.

Good luck and I hope your little group gets nothing but Boone & Crocket bucks.

I know too well from where you are coming from. It's happened before. I hope that's not the case but they all seemed tickled pink last year with both the deer that we came in with and passed on. We dont expect Boone and Crockett by any means. In fact I refuse to enter the club's big buck contest. I just personally really enjoy the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction of taking a nice buck that a little hard work was put into versus taking one from a community stand.