I’m very blessed to have a dad who took a lot of time taking me hunting since I was a little boy. I can’t thank him enough. We are fortunate to have a good place to hunt. We’ve killed a lot of deer over the years on this place, and some of them were good decent bucks.
Three years ago, we started using 30-06 Mineral and 30-06 Plus Protein and have had great results with the deer using it. Our minerals licks are all about three-foot by three-foot wide and a foot deep. This past season, we also planted PowerPlant, and the deer hit all the PowerPlant fields hard. A trail cam picture is included that shows about a 150-inch buck by the PowerPlant. This past October, I was hunting on what we call the swamp area, which is an area we use a lot of the 30-06 minerals. I’ve been getting trail camera pictures for about two months in this area of a great buck that had some freaky points growing forward off the brow tine area. We were guessing he would score in the 150s and with his freaky points he would be easily recognizable. This particular afternoon I had seen about eight young bucks but I had made my mind up to only shoot the big one with freaky points. With about only five minutes of legal shooting light left, the big buck walked from behind me and right under my stand. When I saw him, I got a serious case of buck fever. I was shaking all over. I was able to calm myself down enough to make a good shot at 20 yards. He only ran about 100 yards. I gave him about 30 minutes before I started blood-trailing him, and it took me about 30 more minutes to finally find him. As soon as I saw him, I knew I had killed a buck of a lifetime and that we had way under estimated how big he really was. We rough-scored him at 172. 
