smoking in the stand

i've seen on here and heard a few times of people smoking in their stand, this idea seems crazy to me as i have always been told how important scent control is. Can anybody shed some light on how this wouldn't scare off everything around

Smoke doesn't travel upwind. 'Not advocating it, or cigarettes.

Nope.

I hunt the wind so it doesn’t matter if I smoke or not. No scent control needed, I kill deer regularly in my work clothes since my blind is between home and work lots of days I don’t have time to go home then come back. I have yet to see any scent control work 100% anyway. Sure young deer and some doe will come in from downwind and not worry about scent but mature bucks and old weary doe bust me no matter what from downwind. I’ve tried them all at least once from Ozonics to Dead Downwind....still busted so I don’t waste money on it anymore and focus on wind and weather forecasts.

I grew up hunting with my Dad and those are some of my fondest memories with him. Right, wrong, or indifferent, he used to smoke in the stand and we/he never had an issue with old, grizzly deer (bucks or does) showing up throughout the season.

I agree with many here that there is no such thing as scent control outside of placement according to the wind. Is it smart? Well, smoking isn't smart to start with, but it also isn't ideal for trying to minimize your scent.

PSA - I'm not picking on anyone who smokes. We all have vices, including me, and none of them are usually good for us.

Was smoking a cigarette last year when I shot a doe at 40 yards.

First of all, I only smoke when I'm at the ranch (or drunk, which doesn't happen much anymore), but I smoke like chimney when I'm out there. I guess it's like a nostalgia thing with me. It reminds me of being 12 years old when my best friend Floyd and I would steal cigarettes from his parents. They weren't the best cigarettes (Vantage), but damn, the sense of freedom those dumb cigarettes gave us was unforgettable. I guess the older we got, the smaller the world got. By the time I got to college in San Antonio, 250 miles from home, a cigarette wasn't enough to deliver that sense of freedom. 25 years later, I find myself at our 98 acre "ranch," sitting by the mesquite-fueled fire, a beer in my hand, and a Marlboro in the other. The conversations always seem to circle back to our youths, and all the trouble we caused. Smoking is bad for our health, but sometimes we need to steal a cigarette or two from our childhood in order to breathe.

PS- I smoke in the blind, and never have an issue with the deer.

My dad smokes, drinks beer, eats chips and heats up Vienna sausages in the blind. I wouldn't recommend doing all of that, but in the past 6 years we've taken a 12 pt, 2-10 pts, 2-9 pts, 2-8 points. Maybe the deer in our area just aren't very spooky.

I smoke my pipe in the stand all the time. I'm more of a deer watcher nowadays so I don't really care if it spooks deer or not.

I shot 3 of my biggest bucks with a cig hanging out of my lips. i don't smoke anymore, but deer are curious, they wanna see what makes that smell. i saw 26 does on type 2 land i was smoking and the smoke was traveling towards them, they didn't care walked with 20 yards of me camo'd out !

Our deer don't mind odd smells. I shot my doe last weekend 25 yards up wind of my feeder with a pinch of snuff in.

I think scent control may be overrated. I do try to watch the wind but I have sat on a food plot and had deer
enter the area and walk with in 6 feet of me.

I'm a pipe smoker also and smoke in the stand all of the time. I've often fired up when deer were on the plot and the wind was wrong. Didn't seem to bother them.

I used to smoke, and did so in the stand. I would use the smoke as an indicator of wind. Sometimes the breeze is so soft that it is hard to tell which way your scent is drifting. You can watch the smoke and tell if thermals are taking your scent in a direction that you did not expect it to go. You can see if the breeze is swirling. Scent control is over rated. Hunt the wind.

I've never had a problem with it. Seen smoke blow right in their face and had them even trail the scent from curiosity. They don't seem to associate the smell with humans it seems. It must smell like some kind of plant burning to them. You can't fool a deer's nose though, no matter how much gimmicky scent cover you put on. They do know what a human smells like, and you can't cover up that smell. Amazing what they can do with a nose 50 times more powerful than ours. I've seen them sniff tree limbs that I rubbed against the day before.

My good buddies smoke every-time they are in the stand; it used to piss me off. Over the years have never seen any real effect so I don't mind it now but will never do it myself. They even go as far to open the stand door and pee, which i now do time to time as well, no effect .....

purposely have lit up a cig with deer around to see if it affected anything, it didn't. Have sat in the stand for hours seeing nothing and decided to smoke one and had deer come out within minutes after lighting up. Jokingly tell myself its a great deer attractant.

Maybe it is...I see a new marketing stragety. Doe in heat flavored cigarettes! Mask your human breath and attract big bucks and the same time!

Exact same experience here.

my dad was a pretty heavy smoker for the first 35-40 years of my life, like 2+ packs a day. I have spent countless hours out in the woods with him while he was smoking several cigarettes during a hunt that we killed deer. They didn't seem to mind.

But the scent elimination companies say you have to spray down and hold you breath at same time cause the deer are getting smarter so they look for your breath! Yeah I smoke in stand, or truck or tree stand or propped up against tree. But I only hunt stupid deer

Shot my best buck to date with a bow two weekends ago right after smoking my third cigarette of the hunt in my pop up blind. Like others, I don’t think they associate the smell to danger.

I like your style.

I don't smoke and had the desire to try it the smell always mad me avoid it. Ironically I dip Copenhagen and not sure if it has an effect on deer, I've been winded more than once but not sure what caused it. However, I had a girlfriend in my younger days that would occasionally hunt with me and she smoked sometimes in the stand and the deer didn't seem to spook, this was in the hill country where you couldn't hunt the wind because deer were 360 degrees around you.

Just to add one more dynamic to this discussion about deer being spooky about smells, every season, by January, the deer are so used to us corning the roads that they will come right out into the senderos as soon as the truck that's corning the road passes by. They don't even wait for the truck to be out-of-sight. I'll literally corn the road, park my truck, walk to the blind, make some noise getting into the blind, unbutton my jeans, and light a smoke, all the while those deer are eating the corn that I just spread. Now granted, those deer are almost never a mature buck, but once I get settled and everything quiets down again, those bucks will join the first deer. This is low fence, South Texas brush country.

Dad would sit under a broken tree limb (No Blind), smoking away and still harvest a deer every year.

I hunt with my wife who is smoking. Smoking hot that is! Lol.
We don’t smoke.

Was bow hunting several years back in Coleman County on a ranch overrun with deer and turkeys. I had gotten a pretty good buck the day before, so a friend asked me to take his video camera and sit in a blind across from him while he tried to stick a deer or turkey. About an hour into the sit, a nice buck came in and stopped for a few minutes. I had the camera on the deer at first waiting for the arrow that never came. Panned up and zoomed in on my buddy who was stuck - he had a lit cigarette in one hand and his coffee cup in the other. That buck lived another day.

haha! just don't pass out in a lawn chair at camp during the rut, things could get interesting...

I sure hope all the hunters who hunt the tracts that surround the tract that I hunt, smoke in their stands. Heavy ATV traffic and other activities that pushes an old buck to use my hunting area as his safe zone is fine by me.

I would post a pic if I could convert them to jpeg on this dang iPhone

I don't smoke, but I've got a cloud of Sulphur smoke oozing out my blind most all of the time. It never seems to bother the deer, but it could be the "buck grunt" sounds I add to the smoke.