Charles Strickland harvested three deer with two bolts on the opening morning of Tennessee’s 2022 archery season during a quota hunt in Davidson County. The 63-year-old’s biggest buck to date stretched the BTR tape to 202 6/8 inches and is the largest crossbow-felled whitetail in the Volunteer State.
Tasked by the landowner to take two does before shooting anything with antlers, Charles set up on a tractor gap between two milo fields and shot a mature doe at first light, and then a yearling a few minutes later. Realizing he only had two bolts in his quiver, Charles got down to retrieve one of the bolts and wiped the blood off with the tag from a ratchet strap before reloading it.
15 minutes later, this double drop-tined 15-pointer showed up and moseyed around for several minutes. At one point, Charles said the buck was 5 yards upwind of the first doe he had shot and even stopped to lick the spent bolt that had broken off and was missing a broadhead.
“Normally I get tore up, but this time I wasn’t nervous,” Charles told Buckmasters. “It was like an out-of-body experience. I just told myself to be patient and not to ruin it.”
Charles waited until his target buck began quartering away at 30 yards and double lunged it with his Raven R29X. All three whitetails were in the bed of a pickup before 8:30 a.m.
“I sent my son and friend a text saying, ‘The double-drop is down!’ My son got out of his tree in a flash, and when he got there he was shaking worse than me,” Charles recalled. “The rest of the day all I heard from him was, ‘Dad, you don’t realize what you just did’ over and over. He was proud of what his ol’ dad had just accomplished.”
The drop tines measured 8 inches on the right, and 6 6/8 inches on the left to go with a 26-inch spread.
Buckmasters scorer Hunter Schmittou measured this Tennessee record in January 2023.
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