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Al Arcia shares Thickbrush Outdoors

Thick Brush Outdoors is a family-owned business down in Naples, Florida, as you said. We’re passionate hunters, all of us; my dad, my brother, my entire family’s involved in it. And we have a few products that we make that came out of our hunting experiences, and products that we felt we needed to help our hunting out, and that’s how we came up with them. And somewhere down the road, that turned into a business and grew from our passion of hunting whitetails. Al Arcia shares Thickbrush Outdoors

Bruce Hutcheon: Now, tell me about your hunting tradition; you just don’t start off hunting whitetails, nobody does, unless somebody in their family says, ‘hey, we’re going to go to deer camp, we’re going to go hang out in my stand.’ So tell us something about the hunting tradition. Al Arcia shares Thickbrush Outdoors

Al Arcia: Well, you know, mine’s probably a little different than most. I grew up hunting in the Everglades, and a lot of water, a lot of mosquitoes, just a different kind of terrain compared even to as far central Florida on up, things start drying out and changing. But my dad was an avid outdoorsman, loved fishing, loved hunting, and when I was a young kid, he’d take my brother and I out camping out in the Everglades. Al Arcia shares Thickbrush Outdoors

It wasn’t so much the traditional hunting out of tree stands and things like that; a lot of people ran dogs out in the Everglades, and that’s how I got my feet wet in it, so to speak, but loved, loved being in the woods, and loved just being a part of a walk, enjoy the outdoors and getting the hunting in. And then later on, I ended up at a small college in a small town in Cuthbert, Georgia, and ended up playing baseball at the school there, but in Georgia, there was quite a bit of deer hunting, and that’s when it really became a passion for me. I really got hooked on it.

that’s when it really became a passion for me

I love spending time with my fellow players out there, but I just loved being out in the woods, and we ended up leasing 165 acres from the timber company up there for 65 cents an acre, and every chance I got I just was out in the woods, and that’s how it all started, right then. So your passion for chasing whitetails started this whole thing?

Thick Brush Outdoors wouldn’t exist without the whitetail deer.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Thick Brush Outdoors wouldn’t exist without the whitetail deer.

why’d he go that way?

We’ve all done that. Absolutely, absolutely, and that’s what got me. I said, ‘why’d he go that way?’ And once I figured it out, I said, ‘I need to go buy myself something that works the right way.’ And after, not directly after that, but a few days later, I went to a couple stores looking for something, and I just didn’t find anything that worked the way I thought, in my mind, it needed to work.

So I started thinking about what I wanted to do and we came up with kind of like a tear-drop shaped bottle, and it has a Yorker cap on the end of it with a wick coming out of the bottle. And we put the urine inside that little bottle and once you flip it over and you squeeze that wick, that wick gets saturated and you drop it to the ground. Well, now you have a product that’s continuously feeding urine to the wick, so what that does for you is the last spot that wick touches is actually,

Well, now you have a product that’s continuously feeding urine to the wick, so what that does for you is the last spot that wick touches is actually, when a buck crosses that scent trail, it’s going to stronger to him as he walks to you, not away from you. And once we did that, that changes the whole ball game. Now we started getting more response out of all kinds of deer, not just mature deer, but young spikes, does. Deer is an animal out of curiosity anyway, but during pre-rut, when you’ve got that buck that’s in that right frame of mind, he’s looking for a doe, searching for a doe.

He crosses this scent trail, he’s coming your way

He’s coming your way because he’s saying, why’d he go that way?’ So we started getting more sightings. Really, our hunts just got so much more enjoyable because we were seeing more game. But it’s just like rattling or grunting; if that buck’s not in the right frame of mind, he’s not going to pay any attention, but if you catch him in that right frame of mind, he’s coming and you’re going to get opportunities at deer that you normally wouldn’t have had opportunities at. So that was just one experience that happened to me, from hunting, that changed something down the road that I felt I needed, and now we’re trying to get it out and share it with other people.

And once we did that, that changes the whole ball game. Now we started getting more response out of all kinds of deer, not just mature deer, but young spikes, does.

Deer is an animal out of curiosity anyway, but during pre-rut, when you’ve got that buck that’s in that right frame of mind, he’s looking for a doe, searching for a doe. He crosses this scent trail, he’s coming your way. He’s coming your way because he’s saying, ‘hey, that’s the way she went and that’s the way I need to go.’ So we started getting more sightings. Really, our hunts just got so much more enjoyable because we were seeing more game. But it’s just like rattling or grunting; if that buck’s not in the right frame of mind, he’s not going to pay any attention, but if you catch him in that right frame of mind, he’s coming and you’re going to get opportunities at deer that you normally wouldn’t have had opportunities at. So that was just one experience that happened to me, from hunting, that changed something down the road that I felt I needed, and now we’re trying to get it out and share it with other people.

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