Twenty-six years ago, in a world before cell cameras or cell phones with cameras, then 38-year-old Tim Ritchie harvested Ohio’s second biggest perfect buck ever taken with a recurve bow (BTR). And he had no idea about the buck’s status until March 2023.
He had his mount measured by an official B&C scorer at an expo in 1998, met the entry requirements with inches to spare, and was content to finally tag a certified Booner.
Tim recalls this 5x5 buck and the hunt when he took it clearly, even more than two decades later. He and his long-time hunting buddy, Ed, still talk about getting the 185 Suzuki stuck in a chisel-plowed field during the recovery. He laughs when recalling Ed’s 5-year-old daughter stomping in the mud and walking right out of her pink boots.
The Ohio native’s Black Death bow was custom-built by a man in Wisconsin and offered the latest in recurve technology, with arrows traveling 198 fps on average. He connected at 40 yards just as the buck began to quarter away, and the two-blade broadhead entered in front of the hip and traveled forward through the chest cavity.
“He’s making an arc in the bean field and staring in my direction, the whole time as he gets farther and farther away, he’s getting closer to where he heard the grunt call,” Tim told Buckmasters. “He wasn’t going to come down the field edge; he wasn’t stupid. I knew he wasn’t going to come any closer, so I gave it a crack. I had a perfect, open shot. The arrow got to him, I hit him back and he hunkered up. It was a poke. I was thinking, Oh crap, not good.”
After the shot, Tim watched the wounded buck slowly make its way along a fencerow to a CRP field where it disappeared into a thicket of waist-high honeysuckle and greenbrier.
From 9:00 that night until early the next morning, Tim and Ed trudged through the CRP field, often on their hands and knees, marking every speck of blood they could locate. They ended up calling it quits because Ed had to be at work the next morning.
Tim was on his last day of vacation and due back at work the following morning as well, but he did what any ethical hunter would do and called out of work so he could continue the search. He had a hunch the buck utilized a ravine that runs through the middle of the CRP field and started there on Monday morning.
“I started walking the creek and had an idea where I thought he could’ve gone,” he said. “I’m walking on the sandbar, look down and see a speck of blood on a sycamore leaf. I could see tracks going up a little bank onto a flat, and in that direction, I got up on a tree stump to look and saw the top of his antlers 50 yards away.”
Last month, Buckmasters master scorer Toby Hughes got his hands on Tim’s 1997 bruiser during a scoring event at Vance Outdoors in Hebron. The Pickaway County buck measured 175 7/8 inches and is the fourth-largest buck all-time for BTR Perfects taken with a recurve (or long bow).
Here’s a friendly reminder to get your dust-laden mount measured by one of our official scorers. It’ll never be a record until it’s in the record book.
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