I am on the same page as Smells and thankful for Recurve post , I had a post under Discouraged and I am only a 2nd year bow hunter and love it just learning daily. I am thankful for everyday I am able to hunt and thankful for God letting me. Hope to post a pic soon of my first bow kill.

No problem. I hate to see guys, especially newer hunters, get frustrated with it because it’s such a fun thing to do. But as I said, bowhunting is hard. You’re going to have ups and downs for the rest of your bowhunting life. I have read 100+ books on deer biology/behavior and put in thousands of hours in the field and I still have bad mornings and bad years. For the record, bad is all relative because I’m glad to be out there regardless. That said, I know how frustrating it can be but don’t worry about all these guys every year posting pics of big bucks they kill. Basically, don’t try and keep up with the Jones’. Just learn and have fun. You can’t control everything so worry about what you can control and do the best you can with the rest. If you do that, at some point a deer will present you with a shot. That’s why I say take the first few years to learn. You may or may not get a shot (if you do that’s great). But if all you’re worried about is getting that notch in your belt, you’ll be ignoring a lot of the factors that make a bowhunter successful.

Wow great post. Love this forum more and more every day. Thank you for that.

Oh I'm having fun. I don't expect to kill a deer every time I go in the woods, we all know better than that. The frustration, and maybe that's not even the right word, comes from the silly mistakes I make. The cough was what it was. I wasn't coughing when I left the house or even when I climbed the tree but then, ... I had to cough and couldn't restrain it anymore. What are you gonna do? My confidence is pretty high, hopefully not more so than it ought to be. I learned things though even the other day. My hearing is getting sharper. My mindset was that I would not be able to hear a deer at all following rain the previous night. Hindsight tells me I did hear them coming into that pair of trees. It was just 2 or 3 of the faintest little pops and snaps that I would not recognize as anything previously. Maybe it was because my mind had already told me that I couldn't hear a deer under those conditions, nevertheless I heard them and know that now and will be better equipped to hear them again under similar conditions. So the hunt was not a total loss by any means. That one lesson stays with me from now on.