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Bruce: Five, four, three, two, one. Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host Bruce Hutcheon, and today we’re going to head out to south of Cleveland, Ohio and visit with Doug Dehartpart and he’s the Co-host and Marketing Director for Bloodline, plus he does a heck of a lot of other things, folks, and we’re just lucky to have him take about 20-30 minutes out of his active day, month, year to share with us. So Doug, welcome to the show.
Doug: Hey, I appreciate it Bruce. I appreciate you having me and the opportunity to talk to your viewers and share our passion for Bloodline and our passion for whitetail hunting.
Bruce: Well, let’s start right off. During the warm-up, you were sharing with me about what it takes to get into the outdoor industry and it’s a huge industry, but it’s a very small family. It’s a very small community when you really look at it. So why we don’t we just start there and share some tips and techniques and vision that you have for the industry, not only for yourself, but for somebody that’s looking to break into the industry.
Doug: Well, I say a cool thing is volunteer time. Time is one of the greatest things that you can give to a non-profit organization such Ducks Unlimited, Whitetails Unlimited, QDMA, those organizations do a great deal of good deeds for the outdoorsman, such as getting kids into the outdoors, for teaching you how to better your deer herd. There’s a bunch of different things like that. I’ve been a Chapter President for Whitetails Unlimited going on 13 years, and that’s kind of how I got my start in the outdoor industry, because I was at a fair one day and saw a booth and it said, “Whitetails Unlimited,” and I went up and shook the guy’s hand and just kind of started talking to him and a year later, we started a chapter, and it was one of the fastest growing chapters in state of Ohio and it did real well. I was privileged enough so that the field director kind of took me under his wing and really liked me and what I was doing, and introduced me to some people in the industry and God just really blessed me with a great opportunity to come up in Bloodline and do some cool stuff. So that’s kind of how I got my start.
Bruce: So if I’m a young guy, young gal out there that really likes the outdoors and has a passion for it and wants to see if they can make it a vocation, not an avocation, what are three or five things that you would recommend they do?
Doug: Like I said, one’s volunteer time with a great organization, two is take your passion and pass it on to someone who’s less fortunate than you. If you’ve got an inner city kid or somebody that shows interest in getting outdoors, start mentoring that kid or that person, and those are both very valuable things. You know, getting hooked up with the right crowd of people to come up in the industry.
Bruce: Now what about going to like, you mentioned Whitetails Unlimited out of Sturgeon Bay, I believe QDMA out of Georgia, and then probably the best show that I know of is the ATA Show, and I think that’s held right in your neighborhood, isn’t it?
Doug: Well, my first year that I ever went to an ATA Show it was held in Columbus, Ohio, but it’s pretty Nashville area, Louisville, Kentucky, Indianapolis, kind of in that area so I don’t . . . they need to have it like in Florida or California, where it’s warm, because it’s always freezing cold and your walking around outside, so that my personal request there.
Bruce: Well, I have no influence, so it’s gonna go on deaf ears here, but we have the podcast so there you go. So because I found, through my corporate career, that you show up at the various professional organizations that support your industry, and then like you said, volunteer, get to be known, if something needs to be done raise your hand and go and do it, with an eye of serving rather than an eye of getting. I think that’s one thing that I would shout-out to that question.
Doug: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things too, is be yourself. You don’t have to act like a celebrity or a superhero. Just genuinely be yourself. Reach out to people, reach out to companies that have a product that you really like, and start building that relationship with that company because the relationship that you have between them and yourself might just be a good enough relationship for you to get into the industry.
Bruce: I’m making a note here and I can edit this recording at . . . I was just thinking how to make it in the outdoor industry without really trying, but it’s by serving, but I just made that note. Let’s switch up gears and talk about your passion for whitetail hunting. In the warm-up, again, you said that you like to turkey hunt, but that’s just fills in some time gaps between when you’re in a pre-stand or scouting or picking up sheds from the whitetail. So let’s talk about the beginning. Let’s go back to who got you started in the out-of-doors and specifically hunting whitetails.
Doug: This is a great story. So my dad got me into hunting and our family vacations consisted of fishing or going hunting. That’s what we did. Still to this day, neither of my parents has ever seen the ocean. That’s what my dad does – he hunts. He doesn’t hunt like he used to, but he took me hunting, and I remember the first time he ever took me hunting he said, “Hey, I want you to sit over here and I’m going to sit over here and this is kind of how we’re going to do it.” And I said, “Dad, you see that old tree stand up in that tree right there?” I said, “That looks like a good hunting spot.” And my Dad said, “Well, if it was such a good hunting spot and then it kept their tree stand there and it’s been a really good spot to hunt still.” And I thought, “Oh, okay, maybe he’s on to something.” So my dad set me against the tree, he goes over to his spot, I didn’t like the spot so I got up and moved over and sat against that tree and here comes seven deer come walking by and I shoot my first doe and my dad said, “What are you doing sitting over here hunting?” I said, “It looked like a better spot, so I moved.” Well, nobody else killed anything that whole gun season, it was just me.
So my dad introduced me to the sport, and back in the late ’80s when I started first hunting, it was different how people hunted then to how I hunt now. If you saw a deer back then, you were very privileged. The population numbers were really, really down and a lot of guys would just shoot the first thing they saw because it was a deer at the end of the day, to where now the deer numbers are strong here in Ohio. They’re getting better. The genetics are getting better and that’s what I like to focus on. Growing deer, knowing deer, and keeping the deer around the properties I hunt and so that’s what my thing is.
Bruce: Growing deer and knowing deer. Yep, you know we could go on for literally days with that and listeners, two things . . . and let’s start with the first one. How do you grow a balanced herd?
Doug: Yeah, that’s a good question. So in Ohio, they’re very generous with the deer tags for does. Some counties will let you kill two does and a buck, but some counties will let you kill upwards off six does in a county. That has been something that I think that the state of Ohio has been a little overboard with, as far as you’ve got five guys to hunt 20 acres and each guy can shoot six does, and then when you go to a meeting up to DNR and a guy says, “There’s no deer left.” “Well, you shot 24 deer off of 20 acres, where do you think the deer went? You killed them all in one year.” So I might kill a doe a year. If it starts getting really, really out-of-hand, I’ll take a kid hunting or take somebody who hasn’t had the experience to kill a deer yet, but I typically let my does go, just because of the pressure and the overhunting in some of the surrounding properties that I do hunt.
Bruce: Now, what about knowing deer, the second part of that question is knowing deer?
Doug: Oh, I’ve got a good story for you on knowing deer. So Spypoint game cameras is a big sponsor for Bloodline and they have some new cameras out that are just totally awesome, so I run about 20 Spypoint game cameras, and they contacted me last year and said, “Hey, we’ve got a new camera coming out. It’s a Verizon cell phone based camera and there’s no such thing as a Verizon in Canada.” They said, “We want to send you a camera. We want you to test it, develop it, and help us get this camera really, really good.” So they sent me a camera and I said, “I can’t wait to get my hands on this camera.” I had a standard deer camera that was mounted on a tree. Well, I had to go in and check that camera every time to see what the deer were doing.
Well, at 5:15, legal shooting time ended, at 5:45 I had this 140-inch 10-pointer that was showing up every day a half hour after I got out of the woods. So when they sent me the new camera, I started moving the cell phone camera around in the woods trying to pinpoint out where the deer were coming from. So by knowing my deer and knowing the pattern that my deer were running, I was able to get the camera down further to see where the deer were coming from and game cameras are a very big part of knowing your deer, because you know when your deer walk past that camera at 5:05 and it’s dark at 5:45, you can cut that time to get in on them to try to harvest that deer.
Food sources is another big thing. It’s knowing what your deer feed on, not only where your deer are living at, and knowing the deer, not over-pressuring your deer, is going to give you a much better result and not just going to hunt, to sit in the tree. That’s something that Alex and I talk about all the about the time is don’t go hunt to hunt, don’t assume that the deer is just going walk past you, and you’re gonna have an opportunity to shoot a deer. Pick a deer, hunt the deer smart, use your camera, let it tell you what to do, and then go in to kill. So that being said, the deer that I killed in Ohio this year kept coming in 5:45, 5:45, like four days in a row. I told my wife I said, “I’m not going to hunt again until muzzle loader season comes in, and I’m going to start moving this camera around and I’m going to pinpoint this deer.”
So the first morning of Ohio muzzle loader season, we all slept in, and my buddies went out and they said, “How come you didn’t go out?” And I said, “Because I’m going to kill that deer tonight.” They said, “How do you know you’re going to kill that deer tonight?” “Because the camera tells me what the deer is gonna do.” Well, that evening, I was dragging out that 140-inch 10-point because the camera told me what the deer was going to do. I was confident enough to know my deer, what he was doing that I could harvest the deer.
Bruce: So did you take him out of the tree stand, that round blind, or were you just sitting in ground cover?
Doug: No, I took him out of a tree stand. Yeah, I took him out of a tree stand.
Bruce: So you took the . . . I’m going to kind of wrap this up. Verizon came out with a camera that’ll send you photos to your Smartphone, is that correct?
Doug: Yeah, Spypoint came out with a cell phone that’s Verizon cell phone based, and what it does it texts you or emails you the pictures as they appear from the camera directly to your phone or email. So the first time I had it set out, it was kind of funny, because it was like 5:25. I jumped back in my MIUTB and was heading back to the house and my phone goes off in my pocket, and it texts me a picture of the deer walking past the camera, and I went, “This is kind of a kick in the chops. If I had 15 more minutes of daylight, I could kill that stinking deer.” And that’s when I decided, “You know what, I know where he’s coming from, I’m going to move the camera 50 yards. So I moved the camera and he’s on the camera seven minutes sooner and I just kept moving the camera and like I said, it allowed me to pinpoint where that deer was coming from so I could get in and kill it.
Bruce: Now did you kill him in the staging area or did you kill him between his bedding area and his staging area?
Doug: Yeah, between the bedding and staging area.
Bruce: So listeners, this is pretty good information and technology does work, but you still have to hunt that deer, because Doug, I can guarantee it, he didn’t just go banging through the woods. He stalked the tree that he knew sort of kind of the pattern that deer, was taking either by trail or deer sign, but he had to work it back to where he got to where he wanted his camera to be. Then he did something very smart, he backed off.
Doug: Yeah, I let that place go cold for about a week and half in between Ohio gun season and muzzle loader season and then I went back in the first day of the season and killed that deer.
Bruce: Now, how’d you move your tree stand?
Doug: I just took the climber down there and walked in the woods and snuck up a tree real quiet and that was it.
Bruce: During midday or did you do it . . . ?
Doug: Yeah, I went down midday. I got in there about 1:30 and set it up and did it while the deer are in their beds and that stuff.
Bruce: Now, what about the . . . how’d you factor in . . . so you got the camera, you get the shots of the deer, you know the time’s gonna be right, but what about play in the wind?
Doug: Well, the wind for the location that I was hunting, it was always right. That’s why I started pinpointing that side of the property, because the wind was always right and I knew generally where the deer were coming from, and it was a perfect scenario whether I was 100 yards downwind or 400 yards downwind, I was still downwind on this piece of property, ’cause what was happening it was a 40-acre piece of woods and the deer were bedding on the neighbor’s property, but how the wind was blowing from west to east, the wind blew all the way across from the deer bedding area into the woods I was hunting. The deer were like, by their nose, they were always safe coming into the property that I was on and the other piece of property did have a lot of hunting pressure, and the guys, as soon as they walked into that property all they did was push all the deer right over to me because how the wind was blowing. They weren’t hunting that smart.
Bruce: Listeners, take notes because we’re getting some, I call them big buck nuggets, and big bucks are smart and you have to hunt ’em differently than you do one and half, two and half, I’d even say three and half year old deer. To get over that, four and half, five and half, and older deer, they know exactly where you are, what you’re doing in their woods. It’s not your woods.
Doug: Yeah, that deer I killed was a five and half year old deer. I mean he knows the game, he knows the tree stand location, he knows the property, he knows the food sources, he knows everything. You’re in his living room and bedroom and to get in there and kill a mature buck like that, that’s what I like is learning the deer and figuring them out, knowing what they’re going to do, and it’s like putting a crossword puzzle together. When you get it all lined up, it spells success.
Bruce: Well, I could sit on the front porch and talk to you for a long time about hunting whitetails, because no matter where you hunt, there’s 37 plus states that have whitetails according to QDMA and yeah, they’re going to feed on different things and you might be down in the south and thick swamps, or you might be out in the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, even the Dakotas, but deer still do specific things and they need three things: food, cover, and water.
Doug: And a girlfriend.
Bruce: And a girlfriend, but that’s only for a month a year.
Doug: I know, kind of convenient.
Bruce: The rest of the time they just hang out with their buddies, not a bad life.
Doug: Yeah.
Bruce: Not a bad life. Let’s switch it up and I had Alex on the show last week or the week before, and he’s the other host of Bloodline. Let’s talk about the genesis of Bloodline, and what you guys are hoping to achieve with that program.
Doug: [coughs] Excuse me. So Bloodline, we’re a faith-based hunting show. Alex came up with the God given concept for Bloodline about five years ago. I’ve been with Bloodline here for about four years, and we’ve been through some trials and tribulations, some loss and some growth. Right now, we’re on a really big growth curve and we just switched from Pursuit Chanel to Sportsman Channel, so it gives us a much broader reach. We have about 85,000 followers on Facebook, and we’re proud to be a faith-based hunting show. We’re not overbearing with the scriptures and the gospel, but the bible says that you’re supposed to walk among the sinners like Christ, and so nobody is better than anybody else. We just all walk together and love to meet new people and share our testimonies and our success and our stories, so we can help better everybody.
Bruce: So what are the times you’re on, and how many days a week? Give us kind of your schedule – your production schedule.
Doug: Right now, Eastern Time, we are on 7 PM on Thursdays, 3 AM on Fridays, and 6 AM on Saturday mornings on the Sportsman Channel, and that’s DirecTV, Dish Network, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast. We’re available on all of those. Pretty soon, as we continue to evolve, we’ll air the old episodes. I think we’re gonna do it on our website and there’s going to be teaser reels for each episode here in the next couple of weeks, that will be broadcast on the website too, so you can kind of see in advance what the episode is gonna be all about, so you get a general synopsis of the hunt.
Bruce: What do you hope to achieve with your program, Bloodline?
Doug: Well, we want to keep growing and develop the brand and the image for Bloodline, and the number one thing of Bloodline is we’re-, Alex and I talk about this all time, Bloodline, the bible, everybody is made from Adam and Eve. God created Adam and Eve and we’re all descended from Adam and Eve, and we’re all sinners, whether we made the decision to let Jesus be our savior or not, we’re all in the Bloodline, whether you’re saved or you’re a sinner, we’re all descendents of Christ, we’re all made in his image. And we want to be a branded hunting show that is reflective of the image of Christ and that’s the ultimate goal for Bloodline, is to lead people to the Lord, be a family fun show where we don’t just go sit in a tree stand on a high [inaudible 00:21:15] ranch and kill 200-inch deer. We want to be real with the people, we want to be real hunters that overcome real objectives and teach people just better morals of how we should be.
Bruce: Doug, we’re at the time in the show, I just looked up and took a breath, at 29 minutes we’ve been chit chatting here and so here’s the time that you can give a shout-out. I know at Bloodline you’ve got a lot of sponsors and just give a shout-out to the people that you want to. Again, tell our listeners your url for Bloodline’s website and then how to get in touch with you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, so you’ve got a couple of minutes, have at it.
Doug: Yep, so you can follow us on Bloodline with Alex Rutledge on Facebook. Our main webpage is www.bloodlineoutdoors.com. Our shopping store is shopbloodline.org or shopbloodline.com and you can follow myself or Alex on Facebook, Alex Rutledge or Doug Deharpart, and we’re very blessed to be on Whitetail Rendezvous and we definitely appreciate you thinking of us, Bruce.
Bruce: Well, and we appreciate you and what you’re doing out there in the industry, and I’m sure the listeners as well as I did, took a lot of notes today, because you did share some great information, great tips about hunting mature whitetails. So on behalf of Whitetail Rendezvous nation, Doug, thank you so much for being on the show today and keep the wind at your back, pardon me, the sun at your back, the wind in your face, and always be a patient and have some fun out there.
Doug: Awesome.