Harmon Scents has done it again in 2012 with the RUB-ON Scent Stick with STS Technology. In 2011, we had our first opportunity to work with Harmon Scents and we had a pretty fantastic season with the whitetail doe in estrus scent. This year the versatility of the new RUB-ON Scent Stick.
On opening morning of our 2011 Season, I was guiding Karen Neilson with TDT Outfitters in Western Nebraska. I filled in for the week guiding and the day before season I checked a few trail cameras and headed up into a canyon that I knew that several big bucks had been using to bring doe out of the river bottoms to breed in seclusion. About 15 minutes into my sit, I watched a big buck come right up the canyon and bed 45 yards from my truck. I sat back and took a few pictures of him and called Bryan Clines and told him about the buck. Bryan and I were planning on guiding Karen on mule deer in the morning and we quickly switched our plans over to whitetail.
We got out into the blind at about 5:30am and we were in a pop-up blind and over the next four hours, I thought we would get blown over to Kansas the way the wind was blowing. At about 10am, Karen and I finally broke down the blind and moved it into the back of my truck, pulled the truck up to the canyon rim and sat in the cab. I laid out Harmon Scent in the canyon basin. It was a pretty slow mid-day but about 4pm we started to see some serious action. We took off out of the truck and got down into a draw and the buck we were looking appeared not 20 minutes later. He had followed a hot doe up the canyon out of the bottoms but stopped just shy of where I had laid out the scent. He was lip-curling and broadside and Karen hit him perfectly and he took off like a lightning rod. We stepped out of the draw and Karen hit him again dropping him in his tracks.
Six days later it was my turn and I was across the road in a CRP field. I had no intentions of hunting this particular location but we had a client in the canyon and I needed to get a deer on the ground. I laid out the Harmon Scent all across the tops of the fence posts in the field I was going to hunt and jumped up into the ladder stand. I reached into my pack, grabbed a coke, popped the top and leaned back expecting the action to begin in about an hour. I felt the breeze change directions as I leaned back and realized the wind was blowing in the opposite direction in usual and instead of blowing into the creek bottom it was blowing up the canyon. As I looked up the canyon, a good deer stood up from his bed, shook his head and walked straight towards me. I couldn’t believe it. When he got to 60 yards, I rocked him with the 270 and dropped him in his tracks, I was tagged out at 3:15 with a great big 9 point.
The Harmon RUB-ON Scent Stick offers the quality of Harmon Scents in a solid form that can be rubbed on trees, rocks, fence posts, brush, trees, the bottom of your boots for scent trails and can be hung in the tree as a perfect scent distribution tool and collected after the hunt without leaving scent in the area after your gone. The stick is in the same form as deodorant and you can maintain a single stick for the average season. I am excited to be able to use this scent. One of my favorite tricks here in Nebraska is making scent trails along the fence lines so when a buck hits that fence line he will walk the length of it. This new solid stick allows me to walk down the fence and place scent right on the barbwire as I walk along and especially at crossing points. Anytime you can stop a buck it is going to give you extra time to make a good clean shot.
Cass Creek has come through with an exceptional scent delivery system and this will be in our packs for the entire season. My only complaint in regards to this product is that I wish the stick itself had a small hole in the base of the stick so I could run a line of cord through the base and be able to hang it easily on a tree limb above a scrape. That is not going to stop me from carrying the product in my pack and using it all season.
Get yours at www.casscreek.com or at your local sporting goods store.
