First Bow Buck Joins Club 200
By Mark Melotik
When the first whitetail bow buck of your life measures over 200 inches, where do you go from there? Not a question most of us will wrestle with, but it’s the current reality for Kentucky’s Brock Blevins, 22.
“It all started when I first got a trail cam picture of him back in 2020,” Brock recalled. “We have a cattle farm, it’s about 300 acres. I was 18 and had killed a few decent deer before that, in the 130 to 140 class.”
To this point in his hunting career Brock had hunted several local parcels but had not really concentrated on his family’s largest tract.
“My dad was like, ‘Why don’t you try hunting the 300-acre farm?’ It was then that I got a little more serious, feeding mineral, putting up a camera. At that point I was gun hunting primarily.”
“I didn’t know what to think when I first saw a photo of him. My dad was like, ‘I told you so.’ I always went gun hunting, and would always see a lot of deer, some pretty decent bucks, but never anything like him. He was already about 185 inches; he was big.
“I never did see him [on the hoof] that first year, I was kind of bummed about that,” Brock recalled. Unfortunately, the unique buck would continue his elusive ways for some time.
“The next year, he put on another 10-15 inches, and he added a drop tine,” Brock recalled of his trail cam photos. “But hunting him was pretty much the same thing, I never saw him. I nicknamed him Phantom — he was like a ghost.”
In Brock’s defense, the young hunter wasn’t exactly giving himself many opportunities. At first he was relegating his pursuit of the giant to the state’s short gun season. During the second and third year he also did a bit of crossbow hunting for the brute, but it was during that third year that Brock noticed a disturbing regression of the deer’s rack in his trail cam photos.
“Something happened to him, because he lost about 30 or 40 inches of antler that third year,” Brock said. “He went from scoring in the 190s, to the 160s or 150s. He looked like he was going downhill, but he still got away from me.”
That third year, 2022, Brock ended up bagging a fine 150s 10-pointer with his rifle. But again, he’d never logged even one sighting of the elusive buck that had filled his dreams.
As the calendar flipped to 2023 and the young hunter began his fourth year pursuing the giant, he figured it was time to step up his game.
“That fourth year, I ended up getting really serious about hunting him,” Brock said. “I put cameras out at the beginning of the year, I had them out all year. It was in May that I could really tell it was him in the photos. You could tell it was an old deer, and as the year went on, I kind of felt it was going to be my year. He was coming to my food plot every single day from May on, and he was as big as he had ever been or bigger. He looked like he added on 40 inches or more.”
In July, Brock purchased a new compound bow to help him with his new goal.
“I wanted him to be my first bow kill; I was shooting my bow every day to get ready. It started out pretty rough, but I kept on practicing and getting better. By the end of summer I felt pretty confident shooting off the deck, and out to 40 or 50 yards.”
There are two food plots on the 300-acre farm where the buck lived, a larger plot and a smaller one, spaced about 1,000 yards apart. The buck favored the smaller one — planted in clover and chicory — as did plenty of other deer. That’s likely because very near that plot is a deep ravine, thick with bedding cover.
“The day before I killed him, that evening I saw lots of deer,” Brock recalled of his Sept. 7 sit on the edge of the smaller plot. “At one point I heard something behind me and five bucks were coming in, all in a row, and in the very back was Phantom. All of a sudden they all stopped — I believed they winded me — and eventually they went back down into the hollow.”
The next evening, back in the same stand, the young hunter would taste some redemption.
“I went in about 2 p.m.,” he said. “It was 85 degrees, and I was sweating. It was Sept. 8th, and it was pretty much the same thing: I was seeing lots of deer. Later that evening there was still plenty of daylight when he came in with two other bucks. When he got to 20 yards broadside, I took the shot and I thought I heart-punched him.”
The wounded monarch immediately ran back down into the ravine, but Brock remained confident.
“I waited about 30 minutes, got down, and then went back up to the barn and called everybody. We ended up waiting three or four hours before tracking him. At first the blood trail was pretty good but then slowly trickled down to nothing. We ended up quitting about 1 or 2 a.m.
“The next morning me and my buddy came back about 8 a.m. We went back down into the hollow and after about an hour, my buddy saw his white belly. I knew he was big, but seeing him up close and in person, he was crazy big — he was huge! It was a special moment.”
The shot had been a bit farther back than Brock recalled, and the buck had made it some 800 yards from the shot site.
Brock believes the most-impressive aspect of the Greenup County buck’s 20-point rack is its unique character. Both P2s are split, and it’s also got a split P3. The toppers? Two right-side drop tines. The official BTR score is 202 2/8 in the Compound Bow Irregular category.
As for the future, Brock is as motivated as ever to hit the woods with his trusty compound in 2024.
“I’m hooked as a bowhunter,” he offered. “I already have cameras out, and I have two or three pretty good ones on camera already. One is a pretty good 8-pointer.”