The adventure started Wednesday October 21, 2009. My dad, sister and I woke up that morning around 4:30 to finish packing our clothes and hunting gear into our truck. There was excitement in the room as my dad said “ok let’s get in the truck and go” we said goodbye to Mom and she wished us luck. We climbed into the truck and headed to our friends house, Wayne to meet up with him because he would be joining us on the Maryland hunt also. We got to his house around 7:30 and he loaded up his truck and I jumped in with him and we hit the road with our GPS’s set for Bridgetown Manor Henderson, Maryland. The road trip was going smooth and we were ahead of schedule and decided to stop at Bass Pro Shop and take a look around. We were there for about an hour looking at different hunting gear when my dad tells Taylor to go look at the pictures on a bulletin board that Bass Pro has up, she went over and all of a sudden said” quick come here”. There was a picture of her and her bear she killed in Canada. We finished looking around and decided we had been there long enough and knew we needed to get back on the road so we paid for our stuff and got back on the road.
We finally made it to the Maryland border and had to cross the bay bridge, which is a really big bridge. We started up the bridge when we came to a stop because they were working on the bridge. They would let the other side of the road come by, as we sat waiting and some transfer trucks came by and the bridge started to shake under us. I knew it wasn’t going to collapse are anything but it’s a scary feeling when you look out your window and your about 800 feet above the water and the bridge your on is shaking. We finally got to move on and continued our trip. We also got to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge which gives you a real good view of the bay and just how big it was. At about 3:30 we arrived at the Bridgetown Manor Lodge and went to the club house to sign in and get our Maryland hunting licenses. We meet up a little later with Kevin Paulson and Dennis Brauchle and our guide Bo and went to where we would be hunting the next morning. When we got there Bo pulled out a map of the farm and showed us where the stands were and let us pick who sat were. My Dad and I got a buddy stand on the far corner of the farm overlooking the corn field and Taylor got a stand in the middle of the farm overlooking the same field just about 600 yards away and around a bend. Kevin and Dennis picked a ground blind in the middle of another field leading to the field were Taylor and I were. Wayne took a stand in a patch of woods on the far end opposite of all of us. We finished looking at the farm and went back to the main lodge where we got to shoot our guns to make sure they were still sighted in and hadn’t changed during the road trip. Taylor and I were both dead on, our sights hadn’t changed any. After shooting we walked around a little and got to know some of the other people that would be hunting here. Before we got to sit down for dinner some of the guides and the guy in charge called a quick meeting to talk about some of their rules about hunting and the deer management program they have. Some of the rules were, that the bucks you shoot had to be a certain size. They had to be an eight pointer or bigger and wider than its ears, which is about an average of sixteen inches. Another one was that if you shot a button buck it was a fine of $500 dollars. After they went over some other things we all sat down to eat dinner. As we were eating one guy said” let’s do a pot on who kills the biggest doe,” everyone was up to the challenge and put five dollars in the pot which came up to one hundred and fifteen dollars for the hunter who killed the biggest doe. After we finished eating we went up to our rooms and got our hunting clothes and gear ready for in the morning. We all said our goodnights and hit the beds hoping for a good morning.
Finally it was time to get up and get ready to hunt some whitetail deer. The alarm clocks went off in every room that morning around 3:30 and it was a race to get ready and go down stairs and get some breakfast. We all got ready and got our gear loaded into our truck and the guide’s truck and hit the road, following him to the farm. When we arrived at the farm we did our last minute checks and made sure our muzzleloaders were loaded. Kevin and Dennis went to their spot in the blind, and Taylor, Wayne, Dad and I followed Bo to our stands. Bo showed each one of us to our stand and made sure we got into them before he left. My dad and I were the last to be taken to our stand as Bo made sure we got into the stand safely you could see the sun starting to peak over the horizon. As my dad got the video camera ready and situated we watched the field even thou it still wasn’t enough light to shoot we watched incase a buck stepped out into the field. We settled down and got quiet and waited, waited to see what that beautiful morning had in store for us. As we waited and watched, I told him I heard something moving in the corn field. We listened and through one of the corn rows I saw a deer moving towards the clearing in the field. I told dad and he got the camera ready and I got my gun up and ready to shoot. When the deer stepped out in the clearing I saw it was a spike and told dad “it’s not a shooter”, we watched it hoping another deer would be with it but it was alone. It walked toward us and got within fifteen feet us when it turned and hit a scrape that was in front us and disappeared into the woods. We sat there whispering how cool it was for it to be the first deer when we heard a shot, we knew it had to be Taylor because she was the closest to us and it sounded close. We texted her and found out it wasn’t her and while we were texting she suddenly stopped and then we heard a shot and Taylor texted us” doe down”. I was happy for her I was glad she had gotten something, dad told her to let it lay and be ready in case a buck was following her. We got off the phones and got quiet again when my dad says “josh look to your right”. Four deer had walked out from the corn field and were walking straight towards us, I looked at dad and told him I was going to shoot one. I looked through my binoculars and saw the two deer in the back were button bucks and the two in the front were does. I shouldered my muzzleloader and got ready to shot when dad says “hold on let me get on it, I told him which one and as soon as he said “on it” I made a grunt noise to stop her and as soon as she stopped I pulled the trigger. All you could see was white smoke and her bucking in the air and running into the woods. My dad told me that he heard it crash and that he thought it went down. We text Kevin and Bo to let them both know another doe was on the ground. We sat the rest of the morning without seeing another deer, and only saw three foxes running up the dirt road. Kevin told Bo we would end the morning hunt around 11:30 and he came back to pick us all up from our stands and help Taylor and me load our deer on the John Deere gaiter he had. We all arrived back at the trucks and set the deer out to do a pod cast real quick and talk about our awesome morning. After that we loaded everything up in the trucks and headed back to the main lodge. We were the only ones to get something that morning.
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