Originally Posted by Turkey_neck
Originally Posted by Nightwatchman
Originally Posted by slippinlipjr
FW gets money from oil and gas leases. A few extra dollars from us wouldn't help much for the money needed to buy property. I heard 3500 people signed up for an SOA hunt last year. I'd like to see more opened up like the regular old go in there and hunt when you want to type places.....and don't open the gates for folks to tear up the roads, get lost and wander off the property.



Could not agree more. I am staunchly opposed to the SOA program(despite the fact that I did register for several hunts) If the goal is to get more people involved in hunting, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that you would take true public land and make it available to only a select group of people that got lucky enough to draw a tag. I know the old argument is "low pressure, better experience, etc.' but it just makes so much more sense to me to just make more land available to everyone. Those SOA's are bigger than a lot of hunting clubs.

While that’s true could you imagine how quickly these premier properties would be turned into shucks? You would have 3-400 people show up for the hunts and every deer that wasn’t killed would be run to the next county. I would imagine cedar creek, Uchee and Portland never would have been allowed to be bought by the state to turn into a Wma.



Yes, the hunting would probably not be as high quality, but part of being a good hunter entails patterning other hunters as well as the deer. Without the draw system, I understand that the hunting on SOA land would be just as crowded as the rest of the state's open permit public land, but I cut my teeth dodging other hunters, and I'm not any smarter or better at killing deer than the next guy. Dealing with other hunters on public land is part of hunting. I don't think the need for higher quality hunting overrides the need for more aggregate amounts of public hunting in general.