Pinopolis man wins Bag-A-Buck grand prize

Robin Rogers of Pinopolis was two seconds away from pulling the trigger on a cow-horn in Bamberg County late in the afternoon of Aug. 28.

Then, he saw something move in a cutover about 15 yards behind the first buck. He paused long enough to recognize a pair of big antlers, and moments later, the owner of those antlers stepped out into a fire lane.

It didn’t take Rogers long to squeeze the trigger on his .30-06, and a second later, a big 8-point buck in full velvet crashed to the ground, 85 yards distant.

That was Rogers’ first piece of good fortune. The second was when his entry in South Carolina Sportsman’s Bag-A-Buck contest was drawn as the grand-prize winner.

Rogers is scheduled to accept his grand prize at the Palmetto Sportsman’s Classic the final weekend in March. It includes a Leopold scope, an archery package from Irby Street Sporting Goods in Florence and Anglers Martin in Summerville, and a two-day hunt at The Territories near Ninety Six.

“I was sitting in my stand, when a cow-horn came out in front of me,” Rogers said. “We were shooting cow-horns and anything else that was outside its ears. I put my scope on the deer, and I was just about to shoot him, when I saw something coming behind him. I saw its rack above the cutover, about 15 yards behind the cow-horn.”

Rogers moved the crosshairs from the smaller deer to the larger one and put a bullet behind its front shoulder. It crashed to the ground almost immediately.

It took Rogers, his wife and a friend to load the deer in his pickup truck — and with good reason. The buck tipped the scales at Edisto Processing at 201 pounds. It had a 17½-inch wide 8-point rack.

“I was hunting on a farm that belongs to one of my friends, and I’d seen this deer a couple of weeks before on a different stand,” Rogers said. “The stand I was sitting on that morning, it was looking down a fire lane, and there was another one crossing in front of me, like a ‘T’. I had seen a couple of does that morning.

Every hunter who entered the Bag-A-Buck contest at www.scsportsman.com was eligible for the grand prize, including the four winners of monthly contests.