Many savvy deer hunters make a career of hunting where most others don’t — or won’t. Often, accessing these types of areas isn’t as much about killing yourself physically in the form of hiking “way back in” on huge public tracts, as it is simply hunting smarter. And maybe the best example is using boats, canoes or kayaks to cross bodies of water that keep out 95% or more of the competition.
Much the same, a handful of my all-time favorite whitetail spots require crossing a wide river in chest waders to get to an area where I’ve encountered less than a handful of like-minded hunters. And that’s over the last 25 years. At this point that stretch is darn near my own private ground. I’m convinced the reason is partly the effort required, but it’s also because most deer hunters simply don’t ever consider packing chest or hip waders in their hunting kit — which is fine with me.
But let’s get back to boats, which require even less exertion to lead you to lightly hunted promised lands. And finding these areas is among the most enjoyable scouting you can do, because it can happen during spring/summer fishing trips. To target suitable bodies of water, I like to use the property owner info in my HuntStand app to find lakes that have large stretches of public lands with few or no established roadways, more or less across from public water access points.
So, any energetic hunters who might think to hike around the lake to get to where you can boat across in 10 or 15 minutes would face a few hours of hard walking in country devoid of trails. Few ever consider it from a purely physical standpoint. And then, if things go well, how do you extract the deer you might bag out there?
One of the most-intriguing boat hunts for me centers on large islands on large rivers. In my neck of the woods up in Minnesota, I know several wise hunters who consistently take big bucks from such islands on the sprawling Mississippi river, which can become a refuge for deer during gun season. And a guy I know does much the same during bow season on islands in the Mississippi off the borders of Illinois and Iowa.
Yes, he acknowledged that navigating to these areas in the potentially wintry weather of late October through early November has its challenges, including widely fluctuating water levels. But those who check local regulations, own the right boats and safety equipment — and who proceed with an appropriate level of caution — can score big in the form of heavy, many-tined rewards the crowds never see.
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