Apparently lightning can strike more than once. And for bowhunter Daniel Cremeans, three strikes was the charm for an enormous buck he’d been chasing in southern Ohio along with his half-brother Ryan Slopko. Cremeans says he missed the buck a couple seasons back.
“I knew the buck was in the area for three years from trail camera photos,” Cremeans tells Outdoor Life. “My half-brother and I even had a couple of chances to take him, but we missed.”
Fortunately, they kept getting trail cam photos of the buck. And this fall on Oct. 2, Cremeans was set up near a feeder when the deer came into view.
“He stopped at 30 yards and I made my shot, but the arrow clipped a limb I didn’t see and it flew over his back,” says Cremeans, a construction worker in Ross County. “He spooked a bit but didn’t go crazy. I wasn’t going to risk another shot at him that afternoon, so I let him walk away.”
After his blown opportunity, Cremeans says the buck was showing up less frequently on camera. He stayed away from the stand and waited for the weather to change. He finally tried the spot again on Oct. 12, but saw no deer.
“Then the temperature dropped 30 degrees from Sunday to Monday,” Cremeans recalls. “On Oct. 14, Columbus Day, it was cool and clear with a good wind direction. So, I went to my stand for him again.”
Cremeans got into his stand around 4 p.m. on Oct. 14, and spotted his first small buck an hour into the sit. Pretty soon there were 10 different bucks milling around the feeder and sparring. Around 6:20 p.m., he saw the big buck come out of thick cover from 75 yards away, and it headed straight for the smaller bucks.
“It was like a father disciplining youngsters. He pushed them all away,” Cremeans says. “There still were two small bucks closer to me, and he turned to them and came toward my stand.”
The big buck eventually stepped behind a tree, which allowed Cremeans to draw his bow. He released when the deer was at 32 yards and slightly quartering away.
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“It was a perfect hit. He ran about 70 yards away to a woods edge, stumbled a bit, and disappeared over a slight hill toward a creek bottom. I heard him fall.”
The other bucks were still milling around his stand, so Cremeans waited 30 minutes before quietly climbing down to the ground and heading for his truck. He called his half-brother, and after waiting another hour, the two drove to where the buck had been shot.
“We found a fair blood trail, with lung hit sign and followed it to where I saw him stagger,” Cremeans says. “At the woods line I found my arrow and a large puddle of blood. We found the buck just 10 yards farther along.”
The two brothers loaded the buck into their truck and took it to a nearby barn to dress it. They didn’t have a scale, but they guess the buck weighed between 200 and 250 pounds. Cremeans reached out Buckmasters scorer Toby Hughes, and also his taxidermist, who believes the deer was 6.5 years old.
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“My buck has 15 scoreable points, and Toby scored him the Buckmasters way,” Cremeans says. “He measured the buck at 201 3/8 inches.”
Hughes says the deer has matching 26 3/8-inch main beams with an inside spread of 18 2/8s. The rack also has tremendous mass throughout its bases and tines.
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