Deer Hunting – Big Stick Archery – Bob Smith

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Deer Hunting – Big Stick Archery – Bob Smith

We’re heading out to Mason City, Iowa. We’re going to meet with Bob Smith. His company’s name is Big Stick Archery. If you look around his home there in Mason City, you’re going to see a lot of big bucks, and they were all taken with what I call a stick and a string traditional archery. That’s what this episode is going to be about. It’s hunting way back when. In the warm-up, Bob and I were talking about shooting flaming arrows off the sides of a castle. What a trip that must have been? Bob, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me. 

You read the book Shōgun and you go back through England and Europe. Longbow archers have been part of the war for a long time. Sun Tzu and all his guys, they had bows. 

I don’t know as much about it as you, but yes, I know that archers were like the go-to guys. They were the guys to have. 

There wasn’t a question about it, because they had rudimentary cannons and then they had the archers. They would just shower the sky with hundreds of broadheads either flaming or screaming out and they would hurt you. Somebody had to make those bows and make those arrows and that’s one way to introduce Bob Smith’s Big Stick Archery because he is a bowyer. He is a maker of bows. He’s going to talk to us about why he is building bows. The other parts of the episode are going to be the adventure of hunting. Bob, why don’t you talk to me about being a builder of recurves and longbows? 

I grew up bowhunting, but the traditional thing always tickled my fancy. It seemed cool when you would see the guys that shoot doing that thing. It didn’t necessarily have a great reputation. With my dad, he grew up hunting with a recurve and got some struggles and compounds were a pretty good idea, as far as he was concerned. Eventually, I started hunting with his first recurve that he’d hunted away when he was twelve. One thing led to another, and I started researching to build my own bows like that. I ended up dropping $1,000, bought some cheap tools and bought some materials, and built a bow in my basement. That bow broke, and then the next one was nice. That one shot just fine. I actually still have that one. That’s where the bow building itself started. 

Around that same time, another bow company that I was familiar with, he was planning on selling his business. I put my name in the hat for that. That’s the dream is to do something that you like and not work for the factory or whatnot, which I’d done plenty of. I was not interested in that. I was talking to him about purchasing the company from him and doing a full-time bow-building deal. In the last minute, I decided, I had never made any decision based off making money or being successful. I’d rather do it my own way and not have to follow this guy’s pre-made successful business that he had laid out. I ended up backing out of that deal and went and got myself a business license to start my own business the next day. I probably jumped the gun a little bit on that, but here we are. It’s finally starting to get a little traction and stir in the light where things are heading. It’s a pretty rough few years right out the gate, but things are looking good. I got to be happy with that. 

How do people find out that you make bows? 

I’ve only done social media stuff. I have an Instagram page, a Facebook page. I was doing YouTube videos for a while. I believe I’ve got twenty whitetail hunts on YouTube with myself and friends and some other different oddball hunting type videos. That’s basically it. I also have a website that is www.BigStickArchery.com. I just did it all myself. I haven’t paid anyone to do any of the designing or any of the upkeep stuff. It’s a one-man show. I do social media and YouTube and videos, and the bow building. I even fill the bow sockets, then I ship the bow and you’ve got to do taxes too. 

Tell me about the wood. How do you select the wood that you’re going to laminate together to make the bows? 

All of my bows have a bamboo lamination in the middle, like a core laminate. They’ll have the bamboo on the inside of the limb. You could either go with colored glass, a black, brown, green glass. It’s fairly easy as far as choosing wood because you can’t see, you just see the colored glass. If you’d like, you can upgrade, and then we can put a veneer on the limb, and then it starts to get a little bit trickier. I basically have a general top list. I buy most of it in Des Moines, I’ll go and pick out. There’s a place there that has a fair amount of exotics. I can go down and pick out specific boards that have a nice grain. The goal is to have contrast. If you have wood with a lot of nice grain in it. Maybe you’d want a wood that didn’t have any grain or if you had a maple riser, you might put a different colored wood, like a purple heart. That would be a lot of contrast. It turns out, you can put about any wood with any wood, and it almost always looks good. That’s what I found, but I’m not sure if that answers your question at all, Bruce. 

I’m trying to figure out how somebody says, “I want a bow and I want it to look pretty.” How do they pick out the wood? Is that on your website? How do they do that? Everybody’s different and they don’t want just a bow looking like it was bought out of Cabela’s or Bass Pro. 

Everybody wants it to be the prettiest bow you’ve ever made, which is the goal. A lot of times, the guys don’t know. Once in a while, you’ll have some guys that have bought a lot of bows and they know, “I like this wood and this wood.” That’s it. Otherwise, a lot of times, I’ll ask if they like a light-colored wood or if they’d like a darker bow, just overall theme. If they want something with a lot of grain or maybe a lot of color contrast. I have pictures of almost every bow I’ve ever built. If they follow my Instagram or look on the website, there are a lot of different options. Usually, between looking at some pictures and talking about what they might like, you can get a pretty good idea of what direction they headed as far as choosing woods and what types of woods they’d like to have in their bow. 

We got the wood picked out. How about poundage, do I want a 40-pound bow, 50-pound bow, 60-pound bow, 30-pound bow? 

You could hardly buy a bow under 60 pounds in the ‘60s, ‘70s. It was heavy bows. Since then, there’s been a big shift. All those older fellows, they were shooting 70 pounds. They blew out their shoulders and other health problems. There are a lot of guys shooting 40 pounds, 45 pounds. They just shoot heavy arrows, and they’re still able to be effective hunting-wise, and they can shoot more. They can probably shoot more accurately. They stay healthier because they’re not shooting as heavy of the draw weight. 55 is heavy, around 50 is popular. You need it to be legal in a lot of some Western states, as far as hunting big game. The 50 is the upper end. If you’re a smaller user, female, it might be more around 30 pounds, 25 pounds. I would say the majority of adults are going to shoot in that low 50s. It would be pretty common. 

How do you know the pull when you build the bow? How do you gauge that? What’s the magic formula? 

I basically found a chart from somebody else and took a big guess. Once you’ve built one, you have a good idea what the second one’s going to be. You make out all the layers, all the laminates and the thicknesses so you have a total overall thickness of that limb when it comes off the riser. You can use that to determine your draw weight. You just make a guess the first time and hope you’re close, but after you made one, this 340–stack total thickness of 340,000 was 56 pounds. You say, “We want to go a little lower.” Roughly 10,000 is about five pounds of draw weight, most of the time. If you made the bow an inch longer or shorter, it would change about five pounds. Once you do one, you build the second, and then you have a good idea of where you’re going to be at as far as what thickness of laminations you need to get the specific weights. 

The length, because the longer the bow, the softer the bow, and the shorter the bow, the heavier the bow. 

After you’ve made a couple, you have a good idea of what you need to do and where you need to change or what you can change to get the specific weights. It’s a matter if a guy wants a 50-pounder, I’d just go and I look it up, and I know that I need a 350,000 of lamination that fades out of the riser. That should be for a 62-inch bow, and that should give me a 50-pound bow or whatever the case may be. There are a little trial and error right off the bat. After that, it’s pretty smooth sailing. 

How do you dry your wood? It should be all dried. 

I don’t buy any wet lumber. I haven’t got quite to that level yet. If I was going to get into some more of buying a truckload of some of the nice exotics that are a little bit lower quantity. It’s a little more common to buy a big lot and you’d buy it wet. Most of the stuff I’m buying is from somebody that’s already bought it and halfway milled it and it’s dried and basically ready to use. I’m buying boards rather than a log or a stave. 

You’re still going to press them. Do you press them yourself? 

I’ll take those boards and then I’ll cut them down. I have a drum sander. It’s like a parallel sander with a conveyor belt that goes underneath. I put it on a sled and then I’ll run those laminations through there and you can sand them down to the thickness that I want. I glue those together in a bow form and cook them in a hot box. I’ll epoxy it all together, press it into the bow form, put it into the hot box and then the heat here is the epoxy. 

Do you just cook it? 

It’s like an easy-bake oven. It’s a wood box with some light bulbs in it. 

It’s an art form that goes back to getting people to hunt traditionally because it’s different. There are no sights. Yes, you got a quiver to carry the arrows. You can have a back quiver or you can have a riser quiver, but other than that, it’s all about hunting the game. In instinctive shooting, it takes a while. How long does it take before you can be halfway accurate at twenty yards? 

If you’re shooting instinctively, I would say at least for me, it was a few years before I was comfortable at twenty yards often. What I found is it’s fairly easy to hit stuff at ten yards. The first year, you can hit stuff at ten yards, feel pretty confident. You take a step back and you’re pretty good. You hit twelve yards and it all goes out the window. Literally, one step and you go confident you’re going to hit what you’re shooting at to you’re praying and it just progresses. Maybe after a couple of years, I was comfortable at fifteen, but then sixteen it all fell apart. It’s a slow process. A lot of times, a lot of guys are shooting more of an aiming system. That would definitely give you a lot more success a lot quicker if you are using a type of aiming system or a reference with your arrow tip. That would make you a lot more proficient at twenty yards and a lot quicker. It will definitely take some time if you’re doing it the instinctive route like a few years. 

What kind of rest do you have? It’s certainly not a fall-away rest, so what kind of rest does the arrow sit on? 

I shoot off the shelf. That means that I have a rug that goes on the wood. On the window of the riser, and then on the actual rest there I have it. It’s actually some industrial-grade velcro and I trim it down so it’s not all floppy. It’s a tight little piece of velcro on there and that’s all there is. The arrow rise on that velcro. You’re shooting it nice and low off of your hand. The idea is so that when you’re shooting instinctively, it’s more of like you’re pointing your hand and you want the arrow close to your hands so that it’s easier for your hand-eye coordination to put the arrow where you want it to go. 

What kind of veins are you using? 

Feathers all the way. I’m a feathers guy. 

Turkey feather or crow feathers? 

I think they’re all farm–raised turkeys. I have not done any actual turkey wing and then make my own feathers. I’ve just purchased them. Maybe one day I will get there, but now I have from farm-raised turkeys or whatever and they dye them and all that good stuff. I pretty much get them ready to glue on the shaft though. 

Are you making your own cedar arrows? 

I have, I shoot a lot of carbon arrows though. It’s something that I liked doing. A guy’s got a lot of excuses. I killed a few deer with cedars, and I killed a lot more with carbons and aluminum. They’re just easy. I think I shot more wood when I wasn’t running a business and social media and all the other good stuff that comes with that. That’s one excuse anyway. I do shoot a lot of carbon arrows. 

They’re lighter, obviously. They’ll go faster. Can you get 150, 170 out of your setup? 

I would say for most people 170 are going to be typical, 180. Some are faster, but it’s just like the compound world. A guy might advertise that it’s going 220 but it’s 65 pounds with a 30-inch draw and 400 grain. It’s a set up that nobody’s ever going actually to be shooting. There’s some of that even going on in the traditional world similar to the modern compound situation. Even though I shoot carbon arrows, it’s also light shaft. It’s common to shoot like a lot of weight up front. I have 250 grains that I shoot on the end of my arrow. Even though it’s a carbon arrow, they weigh 580 grains finished. It’s still a heavy arrow. 

That’s a lot of kinetic energy. 

It is a lot of momentum. It turns out if it’s heavy and slow even if it’s going 150 feet per second and it’s heavy, it works just fine. 

The broadhead three–blade and six-blade? 

I’ve shot with the broadhead that I’ve shot for most of my traditional history. It’s a fixed three-blade long head. It’s built to penetrate, but it’s long and narrow. Definitely a fixed blade would be the ticket whether it’s a twin-blade. 

Is it 125-grain? 

No, I had 250–grain. 

Unless you get inserts. 

I have 125–grain broadhead and then I have 125–grain steel adapter to glue the broadhead onto and then I screw that into my regular insert. My regular inserts are still regular grain insert. It’s basically all a head and adapter like that 250. Some guys shoot 350 grain. 

You have to go heavy if you’re going slow. I remember when I first started out, I used the Rocky Mountain Supreme. They’re 125 but I didn’t shoot that fast. My total setup was over 500 grains. 

Maybe shoot some aluminum, which was probably a little heavier. I’m sure they killed and you’re dead. No doubt about it. A fewer or any less dead than they are with your fancy equipment. 

You get the setup, then you get the strings. Are you twisting your own strings or just buying fine strings? 

I make the strings. I make the string silencers. It’s the whole show. I’m not sure there’s anything more I could do as far as this business is concerned. 

Could you grow the trees? 

I could grow my own wood. That’s about it. I could build strings and silencers and set the bows up and throw up a bow socket and ship them out. I’m the shipping guy too. 

When you think about all this, even as big as archery is, there are still a lot of guys out there that are traditional archers. I know the Colorado Bowhunters Association is huge. I’m a proponent of the traditional archers because that’s where it all started. You don’t need to know the history lesson. When you think of it, the thing I know about traditional archery, you’re shooting 30 yards and you’re Fred Hill or somebody. He might have shot 40 yards or 50 yards with traditional, but you’re 30 yards in. However you do it, people kill deer every year at ten yards. That’s a lot of stealth. What’s the longest shot and the closest shot that you’ve killed the deer with? 

I shot two that were probably pretty close to the stand. They were right around 32. I’ve definitely killed up a few that were at six yards on the ground. 

Let’s camp out on that. You’re not up in the air. Are you on the ground? 

When I shot that deer at six yards I was on the ground. I hung a lot out of the treestand. I went on the ground hunting for a few years and killed a few deer off the ground. I always say I’m going to do it. It’s hard to give up that nice longbow where you can see good and see everything coming. I ended up talking myself out of it. 

Six yards is not much far away type stuff. 

It’s not very far away. He knew I was there. 

Was it a buck not a doe? 

That was the biggest buck I killed at that point. He knew I was there but it’s too late. I was at full draw and dropping the string and he gave me the old eyeball. I suppose he just felt my breath on him. 

He heard your eyes blinked. 

He heard my eyes blinking, but I was too late. 

Tell me about how that happened because very few people will ever kill a deer at six yards. 

This was when I was dead set on. The deer was on the ground. I had wood arrows. I was going all in. I had a flannel shirt. I was going to hang off the ground. I was doing the full traditional experience. I hunted off the ground for about a month. I had a lot of close encounters. I was set up on the marsh. There was a little high spot between the marsh and a little bit of brush like a little bit funnel. When I trimmed out the bush in the morning in the dark, I thought I was a little further from the trail than six yards. I sat there all day and I think that was the only deer I see and I probably had him at 11:30. I sat there until 11:30 prepare to move, holding my bow pretty much halfway ready. He came in and within eight seconds it was over. It worked out pretty slick.  

You’re in a marsh. Was it wet on your butt? 

I call it a funnel. I will say there is a marsh to the north and the south and then there was a little high spot running between them, just like a little dry ridge that had some brush and small trees on it. I was set on that and the deer was coming on that high spot with the marsh to north and south. 

You had the wind obviously in your favor. Did you have a flat red camo on? 

I had a gray and black plaid. 

You had all the scent deodorant that you needed. 

I probably still used a scent soap at that time. I was probably scent-free in plaid. I think I had full both hands on. I was into it. It was a good getup. 

Did you have rubber boots on? 

I was worried that I was going to get too cold in just my plaid shirt. I think I had my boots on. It was pretty chilly that morning.  

Are they rubber bottom? 

They were pretty traditional–looking. They were not very good. 

They’re warm. 

I was about to give up on it. It turns out I realize personally if I’m ground hunting, you can’t see anything. I could see fifteen yards. The deer would be in range by the time you can see them. I felt like I had to sit there more or less fingers on the string, the bow ready to go. It turns out it’s like intense mentally, physically draining. It’s tough. First, that’s what I found, but I’m ready because I’m on the ground. 

Were you sitting in a chair? 

I had a little stool that I was crouched over on. It’s easy. Sit there and don’t move. 

You still had a shooting lane and he was still directly in front of you or was he a little cording away? Did you let him walk by you? 

I’ve seen him probably at about 30 yards and he was coming right down that little funnel that I was sitting in. I had the bow up, nocked up and ready to go. I had shootings lane to both sides of a little shrubby tree. Basically, the plan was whether they were coming or going, you would see him draw when he went behind the tree, and then shoot him on the other side. That’s what happened. He hit the other side and heard my eyes blink. I think he went and put it in a better spot a bit longer. I went probably 40 yards. From there on out it was all good times. I was getting away and going to look for him. 

Did he get into the swamp? 

Yes, just a little way, it’s not bad. I suppose when they go 40 yards they can’t get too far. We found him in cap underwater. That was a big deal. I was pumped up at that point. It was a big day for me. 

That would be a big day for anybody to be that close. I shared a story. I was in a tree that had blown over. I climbed up in there and I was sitting up in there. When they back the roots and the trail went exactly underneath me, a doe literally was underneath me. That’s how I know cougars. They just dropped, they’re silent. They pounce and it’s all over. It shows you can do that but one, you have to be patient, two, you’ve got to play the wind and three, you have to be where the deer are going to come because it is a close encounter. Your nerves have to be good. You have to be rock-solid that deer, draw, release. Deer, pull back, ankle point and then release. It happens quickly. 

That’s what I was trying to say, going with what you were saying that you need to be doing it. You need to be very conscious of your movement. You can’t stand up and turn around and get your bow ready and shoot when you’re that close or you’re hunting on the ground like that. You pretty much have to be ready to pounce at the drop of a hat. 

Tell people how they can get ahold of you? 

I have a website BigStickArchery.com. I got Instagram and Facebook both just Big Stick Archery. My email address is [email protected]. It’s easy if you Google Big Stick Archery and hopefully you find one or the other. Find something that works for you. 

How many bows can you put out a year? 

I did not build very many. It’s a personal experience. I think I built 50. 

Is that one a week? Two weeks off for good behavior. 

I think I built 45 or 48. The goal was 50. It doesn’t sound too bad, but there are a lot of other guys at the business that built a lot more than that. I’m not worried about what they’re doing. 

Whitetail Rendezvous is all about deer hunting. There’s so much that goes into deer hunting. That’s why I wanted Bob on the show. Here’s a guy that loves life and he’s building bows that will go out with his equipment and it will kill or they will miss and they will otherwise enjoy the hunt and live the hunt. We’re shifting over to the second part and Bob’s going to talk about the hunting adventure. I asked Bob, “What are the three things you’re passionate about hunting?” He hemmed and hawed and didn’t know how to unpack that. A lot of people don’t because if you think about, “I love to eat venison. It’s a great meal,” and that’s a good conversation. People say, “Why do you hunt? Have you ever had a great tenderloin wrapped in bacon, maybe some sautéed onions, some fresh greens, new potatoes and a nice glass of Merlot?” “Have you ever had that type of meal?” “No.” “Why don’t you come over my house and I’ll fix it up for you.” That sounds good. 

You’ve got me going. 

There are other people that say, “I haven’t killed a deer in a long time, but I wouldn’t ever give up deer hunting.” What’s up with that? They love being there at the crack of dawn or when the day is done, two magic times. If you want to see a magic time in the woods, it’s when the woods wake up and the woods go to sleep. With that background, let’s talk about the adventure of the hunt.  

That’s what it is for me. Originally, I hunted around home a lot, but I do not hunt by the house. I drive a few hours to hunt, and that ups the adventure factor. It’s pretty boring hills, flatland around North Central, Iowa where I live. Even just going over to Eastern Iowa. There are some bluffs and it’s a lot more of an adventure. You camp out for a couple of days and it’s a lot more exciting and bigger woods. You’re not on your little farm lot that a nice guy down the street let you hunt that’s an acre–and–a–half. I think the place is a lot of it. It’s being in a big wilderness and see woods, I like the adventure. I want to walk uphill. I want to suffer a little bit, but not a lot. I feel like I work for it. Get stuff that other guys wouldn’t want to do. Part of it that I think about that. Anything you’ve got to say about that? 

I know the Bluff Country. I went to school in Lacrosse and I shot some deer along the Mississippi River. Those bluffs are steep. The hard thing is how do you figure out where there would come through because the food is up top or down below. Down below is the railroad tracks and then you get the river for the most part. Most of the crops are up top. If you think about that, let’s talk about the scouting. Let’s talk about hunting Bluff Country and how do you go about doing that? 

I have admitted to stopping studying whitetails, which probably sounds bad. It happens on a lot of stuff. It’s like with the bow building. You read everything you can find. You read it and then you start rereading stuff. I talk it up as I needed more experience. I’m not going to be able to read anymore and learn anything else that way. I’m just going to have to say spend time doing it, but the last information that I read on whitetail and the last forum online that I was a part of was TheHuntingBeast.com. A fellow by the name of Dan Infalt started that. He had a couple of DVDs, hunting hill country bucks was the one. He also had a marsh bucks video. They talk a lot about finding buck beds, hunting buck bedding areas, doe bedding areas. Where you would find bedding areas and hill country like we’re talking about in the Bluff Country along the Mississippi. It’s not fun. It’s a hard video to watch. It’s three or four hours long and it’s hard to take in all the information. It is not a hunting video. That forum is full of information. Have you ever heard of Dan Infalt? 

I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never met him. I need to have him on my show because I talked to another guy, he’s slowly bought into his strategies. He hunts for beds. That’s all he’s looking for. Forget ruts, scrapes. 

I’m not necessarily on Dan. Dan and a lot of guys on his forum are specific hunting specific bucks in their bed. They’re scouting for the bed and then they’re saying, “I think that buck’s in that bed. I will go kill that buck specifically.” I looked at it and took in all the information about reading maps and where the deer would bed and feed and use that to figure out where I could hunt for more of a deer movement, as opposed to hunting a specific buck. Basically, in the rut, I’m looking to hunt doe bedding areas. How to pinpoint doe bedding areas where the buck can be looking for does. A lot of my research is map study. I look at a map and figure out which way the wind is going to be blowing that day, and then I can usually whittle down. Even though I hunt the entire county of Allamakee, given a certain wind direction, I would probably have three places that I would sit in the whole county. It’s a lot of public lands there. For some reason, it didn’t work for me. I basically study maps, use the current wind direction, look where I would go based off of that wind direction and it whittles down a lot of hunting. 

Are you a DIY public land? 

Yes, I’ve shot a couple on some private ground, but pretty much vastly public land, especially in the last several years. I grew up hunting on a great farm but I haven’t been there for several years. 

The buck off your shoulder, is that a public land or private land buck? 

That’s a public land buck from Northeast Iowa. 

It looks pretty small. 

It’s bigger than him. He’s a nice buck. He set off and I went on a hot streak there. I was reading the forums and studying Dan Infalt’s stuff a lot and starting to get into that. Maybe that was the year after. I killed that buck the day after my dad killed his first buck in Iowa. He drew his tag from Wisconsin, came over and did a bunch of scouting, shot his deer thirteen minutes into the first day. It was a ridiculous amount of time. Ten minutes and he had passed a couple in that amount of time. The next day he walked me into the stand because I’ve never been to this public yet. He dropped me off and I shot that deer at 9:00 and that was our week-long rut vacation. We killed two deer out of the same tree in two mornings. 

You use a hang-on. Is that correct? 

Yes, I think he had a couple of different sets like tree hung. I do all hang and bang. That’s a TheHuntingBeast.com thing. 

I call it run and gun. 

It’s the same thing. I might leave a stand and hunt it the next day once a year, but not very often. Mostly I’m hanging the lone wolf taking it down. Just go on with that and go on for the surprise factor. It seems to work for me. It’s definitely more work. 

I used to use screw and steps and then I did get tree sticks, so I’m nine feet and ten feet up and then my stand. I don’t hang scents anymore. When I did that, I would have for 40 acres maybe two or three stands. On the family farm that I’ve been invited to hunt for years, there are stands all over the place. Every place you think there should be a stand, there is. I wish they would take them. Once a year, we take all the stands down and then go in with chainsaws and take all the wooden stands that have been there since Uncle Bert hung it in 1950. There is one stand, the Taj Mahal, it’s twenty feet up in the air and they build it on telephone poles. It’s got a stove. You could spend the nine-day season. It has a pulley and walk-up system. It has a latrine down below. You just walk downstairs and go to the latrine and then you pull all your food up and there’s the woodstove. The kids’ jobs were to make sure that the Taj Mahal was fueled. There are plenty of woods. For the old guys, it’s going out and sit with 360–degree opening windows. The carpet floor with couches and the whole thing. It was that big and that’ll be there forever. That’s the only one I wouldn’t want to ever takedown with no reason. 

No, that’s got to be a permanent guide. 

That’s not going on any place. This is my two cents. If you’re leaving stands up on the family farm forever and ever, just do yourself a favor. Take every stand down and rethink your farm. I don’t care if Uncle Buck has killed a deer every single year for the last 30 years from the concussion stand, that’s fine. 

It did happen. There are some spots there that have not been that long, but take them down, back your stands and make sure your straps are good safety-wise anyway. At least inspect them. 

Give it a rest. I know some of the stands I have been able to and people go, “You’re moving that stand? You can’t move that stand.” I go, “Yes, I’m moving that stand.” I’ve seen enough bucks go by there that the buck I want to shoot isn’t going there. I literally had a young deer walk around completely 360 that stand with me sitting in it. 

They figure that stuff out for sure. That’s why I do it primarily. Aside from I don’t want people to feel my lone wolf stand. 

In some places, you have to. In public land you have to take it down. 

It seems like that first sit is usually the best one anyway. If you run and gun, that’s it. That’s the big reason I like that. I think you get away with a little bit too especially in November during the rut where they just don’t know you’re there. They don’t expect you to be there, so you might get away with it. If you hunted that same stand fifteen times that season already, they’re probably going to be a little savvier. You’d be in there probably walking around. 

I hunted one farm in Buffalo County. I could park the truck right on the road. I never turned on my headlamp and walked right to my stand just by feeling the trail. That’s through the woods. That’s not walking down a logging trail. 

I bet you sat there more than once or twice. I’ve never hunted a lot in the same class. I would hang stands and then spend on once or I would hang standing and have to take them down and I never even sat in on one. That’s just the direction I went. The run and gun work for me. A lot of my friends want to sit in the same stand because they haven’t memorized. They don’t need a flashlight. They feel the sticks on the ground and they remember where they’re at. They walked it 75 times. 

On private land, there are only so many places you can have those stands. 

That is a fact. I think that’s part of the reason I like hunting public so much and I don’t put any effort finding private. I like being able to roam around inspect stuff out. Go do that thing. It got a little boring when I had to hunt 20 or 40 acres. I like seeing stuff. It’s the adventure. I don’t keep the grounds. 

Mr. Smith, this has been an absolute joy. Let’s just give one tip about deer hunting public land the Bob Smith way. What’s your tip you want to leave the readers with? 

Hunt where there’s big deer. It’s not a coincidence, I go to Northeast Iowa. I could very well hunt around my house or anything like that, but I shot more big deer over in Eastern Iowa because there are more deer there. I would say even if you do not want to hunt a big deer, hunt where there are more deer. It’s going to make it a whole lot easier if you have a more target-rich environment whatever the target is that you’re looking for like anything else. It’s way easier to catch a fish if there’s a fish in the pond. That would be the one overall tip. Try to find the place with the most critters that you can find that you’re looking for. 

It’s been a joy, Bob. I look forward to seeing at Iowa Deer Classic. Do you go down to that? 

Yes, I’ve been down there a handful of times. I definitely will get back down there, so maybe I’ll run into you. 

I’m going to work on a couple of things and get some stuff rolled up. With that, on behalf of almost 250,000 audiences of Whitetail Rendezvous, you’re going to be guest number 537. I shouldn’t say it like that, but it’s such a joy and it’s the adventure. We’re getting to the point that people are starting to notice and recognize us and I look forward to being able to the hunt more because I’ll be getting sponsored. 

Thanks for having me. 

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