Main-frame 8-pointer scores almost 152 inches Boone & Crockett.
Hunting buddies Drew Getman of Raleigh and Mike Taylor of Swansboro had two huge bucks on trail cameras on a piece of property they were hunting in Alamance County.
Getman tagged a 145-inch 10-pointer back in September, on opening day of archery season; his only regret was he was afraid that all the commotion surrounding him tagging the buck would handicap Taylor in his pursuit of the second trophy – a huge 8-pointer with a drop-point.
Boy, was he wrong.
It took Taylor, an inshore fishing guide (Taylor Made Charters) who met Getman on a charter trip, all of three weeks to run an arrow through the second big buck, and it, too, was a monster.
Click here to read about Getman’s big kill.
Taylor’s 165-pound buck, a main-frame 8-pointer with one split tine, measured almost 152 inches and featured three tines 10 inches longer or better and a 19 1/2-inch inside spread.
“I had about a hundred pictures of both bucks,” Taylor said. “This deer had a 3-inch drop tine on its right beam that it had broken off sometime before I killed it. I don’t know, maybe the big 10-pointer that Drew killed broke it off. Who knows?”
Getman and Taylor had the two big bucks feeding back and forth between their stands in early September. After Getman dropped the 10-pointer, Taylor moved his stand out of necessity – the second big buck had changed its habits.
“He’d changed his pattern; he’d gotten into a sanctuary within the property,” Taylor said. “I set up a stand, and the first time I hunted it I saw 15 bucks, and one of them was an 8-pointer that was probably 125 inches.”
The afternoon of Oct. 1 was the second time he sat on the stand, which was on one side of a deep, wooded gully that ran out like a finger between two fields. Logs were piled inside of the field edge several yards back from the fence that surrounded the fence.
Taylor had a corn pile back from the field on a little high spot, and at 6 o’clock, a cowhorn appeared, hopped up on the corn pile and started to feed.
“He was acting skittish; anytime a limb dropped and made some noise, it would jump down off the corn pile, then settle down and get back up on it,” said Taylor, who said the temperature had dropped 20 degrees between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.
That cold front brought with it a brisk wind.
“The wind was screaming, and I was thinking, no deer would come out, but at 6:20, the cowhorn looked down through the trees, got down off the corn pile and meandered away,” Taylor said. “At about 6:30, I heard something, and I looked back and this buck jumped up on the corn pile.
“I could see the split G-3 on his right side, and I knew it was the big 8-pointer. I did a double-take.”
The buck appeared a little skittish, thanks to the 15- to 20-mph breezes, so Taylor knew he needed to take the first good shot that presented itself.
“He was quartering to me; it wasn’t a great angle, but I knew what I had to do,” said Taylor, who was shooting a Mathews Z-7 bow with a Beaman Full Metal Jacket shaft and a Rage broadhead. “I took the shot, and he kind of dropped and went forward. I saw where the arrow hit, and I knew it was a good shot, a lethal shot.”
Taylor, who lost a big buck several years ago by following it up too quickly, decided to give the buck plenty of time to settle down and die. He went home, planning to come back the next morning.
“I didn’t sleep a wink,” he admitted.
Taylor brought a hunting buddy back with him to help find the deer, but that was no trouble. The buck went only 40 yards from the spot it was shot, piling up dead from a shot through the liver.
The big buck carried a 4×4 mainframe with a split G-3 on the right beam. The end of the right beam had been broomed off in velvet, leaving it 21 6/8 inches long, compared to a 25 6/8-inch right beam. The buck had G-2s measuring 11 and 9-6/8 inches long and G-3s that measured 10 and 10-1/2 inches.
It was a heavy rack that carried its mass all the way out, with circumference measurements between 4 and 4 6/8 inches.
The buck had a couple of small sticker points, plus the 2-inch split on the G-3 on the right side, and wound up with 6 6/8 non-typical inches.
“It had broken that drop point off, but I’ll be hard-pressed to kill another one in North Carolina this big,” Taylor said.
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