Burlington pastor on tight schedule squeezed in a Guilford County trophy

Hunter’s 13-point buck green scored 162 inches

Randy Hobbs wasn’t planning on deer hunting on Nov. 5, the second Saturday of blackpowder season near his Gibsonville, N.C., home. He had a 10 a.m. meeting at the church he pastors, New Hope Baptist Church in Burlington.

But when his son got up to go to work, he convinced Hobbs that he needed to be in the woods, and a couple of hours later, he was kneeling down, admiring a great 13-point buck that grossed 162 inches.

“My son said it was a nice, cool day, and I needed to go hunting, so I got up,” Hobbs said. “I had to be at church at 10, so I figured I’d hunt a couple of hours. I didn’t get into the woods until after daylight.”

Hobbs was finished well before his church duties. At 8:15, a huge buck he had on a trail-camera photo stepped out in the open, in answer to a series of grunt calls Hobbs had made, and moments later, the buck was down.

“We had seen him on the trail camera, but we didn’t know he was quite that big; the trail-camera photo didn’t do him justice,” said Hobbs, whose buck had a 21-inch inside spread and 10-inch tines on either beam of a main-frame 5×5 rack with three small sticker points.

“I was hunting a soybean field, in woods that acorns; they had everything they needed right there,” he said. “I shot him close to where I’d gotten the photo of him on the trail cam.”

Hobbs said he had just finished a series of grunt calls when the buck stepped into the open at between 60 and 70 yards. He didn’t need any prompting to lift his .50-caliber CVA muzzleloader and blow some smoke. The buck ran about 100 years before piling up.

“That was the only deer I saw that morning,” said Hobbs, whose taxidermist measured the buck at 162 inches gross typical. He expects the buck to net in the low 150s.