I'M STARTING TO BELIEVE GRAPEVINE LAKE IS A MONSTER BUCK AREA
COLUMN by RAY SASSER / The Dallas Morning News rsasser@dallasnews.com
When Buddy Singletary heard about the drawing for archery deer hunts on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land that circles Grapevine Lake, he figured it might be fun to hunt close to his Lewisville home rather than driving to a hunting lease in East or West Texas.
Singletary got lucky twice. First he got drawn for the permit. Then he made a broadside, 35-yard shot on a huge buck. A taxidermist measured the antlers at about 189 net (195 gross) Boone and Crockett nontypical points.
The deer won't make the B&C all-time records (too many nontypical points to score as a typical, not enough for a nontypical), but it'll go high in Pope & Young archery records. And it would not look out of place on the walls of Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, which isn't all that far from where the buck lived.
It's the archery deer of a lifetime for any hunter who works for a living; Singletary is a construction manager. The Grapevine monster was also Singletary's first buck with a bow and beat his previous best whitetail by nearly 70 inches.
Last summer, after drawing the Grapevine deer hunting permit, Singletary started scouting the Corps property. Figuring that's where most of the hunters would wind up, he quickly ruled out trying to hunt in any place that was easy to access.
"I saw a lot of deer while I was scouting, but the only bucks that I saw were young bucks," he said. "I found a marshy area where the cover was thick and there were lots of deer trails."
At first Singletary tried hunting from a pop-up ground blind, but the cover was too thick. He finally opted for a tree stand to get above the cover. Corps of Engineers' rules do not permit the use of bait to attract deer near a stand, so this was as pure as a Texas deer hunt gets.
Nov. 14 was a cool morning and the whitetail rut had finally kicked in. While Singletary sat in his tree, watching overhead jets descend, like giant geese, into Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, he spotted an ample eight-point buck in thick brush. The deer quickly disappeared, but the hunter was hoping to see him again.
An hour later, he heard deer moving to the left of his stand and watched three does pass nervously. He then looked behind his stand and spotted a big buck trotting toward him. He took the first shot offered, hitting the deer through the shoulder and dropping him in his tracks.
"He went down in some high, marshy grass," Singletary said. "I could see him, but I could not see his antlers very well. I thought I had shot the eight-pointer that I'd seen earlier.
"I figured the deer would probably weigh 200 pounds and I needed some help getting him out of the woods, so I walked to the highway and called my brother-in-law, Brad Coleman, to help me. Not many guys will get up early on a cold Sunday morning and tromp through a marsh to help recover a deer."
Remember that Singletary had never shot a buck with an arrow, and he knew you were supposed to give the deer plenty of time to make certain it was dead. It took Coleman about 30 minutes to find the hunter, then the two men walked back to the deer.
"I was in shock when I lifted this monster's head from the marsh," Singletary said. "Exceptional mass, long tines, good beams and 17 total points contributed to the deer's outstanding score."
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