The Legend of Captain Jack

Captain Jack is a deer that first showed up on our farm back in November of 2010 as a 2.5 year old. His long sweeping beams reminded me of a pirate hook, so I named him after the most famous pirate of the time, Captain Jack Sparrow...



I never laid eyes on him during November that year and he eventually went MIA after a final appearance in our creek bottom on December 1st. Last summer, he spent a great deal of time with my #1 hit list buck Moe in an area I call Hippie Ridge. Even in to the fall, they would run together frequenting the same creek bottom where they both made their first appearances the year before...





Again that fall, he eluded me and I was thankful he did so as I didn't need the temptation of shooting a 3.5 year old with all kinds of potential. A week or so after a small confrontation with his summer time companion, he vanished for several months only to return again after muzzleloader in a thick area towards the end of Hippie Ridge...





I knew going in to this season that he would be my #1 target as he was the first deer I had developed a 3 year history with, and I had high hope those split G2's would get even better! My thoughts were that he would become a 145-150” main framed 8 with split G2's. Boy was I wrong!!! I have no idea what became of that old rack, but he still grew a great rack as a 4.5 year old.









The strangest part about his transformation from 3.5 to 4.5 was his sudden "fear" of trail cameras. Greg and I have a theory that the IR layout on the SpyPoints is part of the problem, but regardless of the cause he avoided my cams like the plague all year long. I was fortunate enough to get at least one picture of him on every camera pull for most of the summer and in to the fall. Once the season arrived, I knew I was in for quite the battle as I was dealing with a mature buck that almost always moved under the cover of darkness and I was yet to lay eyes on him in 3 years. That would all change on Friday, November 9th, 2012. A day that would take the growing legend of Captain Jack and transform it to a whole new level...

With my buck tag notched and my good buddy Bryan (Bloody Nock) looking to kill his first truly big whitetail, I invited him out to the farm to sit in one of my favorite stands. By 8:30 that morning, Bryan had drawn just a few specks of blood and some white belly hair after being forced to hold his draw upwards of 3 minutes as Jack picked him out of the tree on the draw. Shortly after the shot, which I still did not know about, I laid eyes on Jack for the first time in our history together as he worked a loop that a 150” 10-point worked during the rut of 2010. Not only did Bryan have a great encounter, but I got to see him do something I knew would make him killable if not this year, then next. The icing on the cake for all of this would come on Saturday as I went to pull my SpyPoint HD-10 that was on a 2 week soak over a scrape in one of the thickest areas of Hippie Ridge. I purchased these cameras solely for scrape duty and they paid off with perhaps the single coolest gift my cams have given me in a close to a decade of use. This was taken no more than 20-30 minutes before Bryan’s encounter…

[video=youtube;W12IPCQgirk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W12IPCQgirk&feature=g-crec-u[/video]

So at this point, Captain Jack and the story we are building together may very well have taken the #1 spot on my list of deer stories. I can only hope he survives the rest of the season, unless of course he wants to walk in front of my wife!!! But I do hope he makes it to 2013 and that as a 5.5 year old with 4 years of history on our farm, I can write the final chapter on my best deer story to date!!!

I'm fairly certain I will have more videos of him on the next cam check. The mock scrape I made on one of his travel routes got 3 times bigger since last week, so I'm hopefully it was him...

Shoulder Blade said:

The audio is a nice addition to the video. I need to go back to see which model this is.

Click to expand...

It is a SpyPoint HD-10. I bought two of those for the HD capability just for scrapes. I also have a few of the IR-7s which also have the audio, but take standard video. They've all been great cams so far.

I can't imagine a better turn of events for this story than what transpired on Friday evening. On the way in to hunt, I glanced down the logging road and saw something that looked like a shed. No sooner than I had said "that's a shed" in my head, my wife yells: "There's a shed!" Sure enough, laying on the side of the logging road was a shed that was not there two weeks prior and had seemingly shown up out of thin air...



As I approached the shed, I knew instantly who it belonged too and was overcome with emotion! After years of hunting specific bucks, I finally had a shed to go with a story!!! The shed we found is the left side of Captain Jack from last year...





Overall, it is in great shape minus a few gnaw marks and a couple of spots where it appears it was hit by a disc. I have no idea how the shed ended up where it did as I have been past that very spot dozens of times this season and never saw it. It was either carried there by something or someone, or it was hit while the landowner was brush-hogging last week and it kicked over to this spot. Regardless, I was thrilled to find it. To add to the story, I found it hours before spending the evening at deer camp with Ric and Ron, the two biggest shed nuts I know!!!

After putting a tape to it, I am shocked at how small he really was last year. I always figured he would go 130-135", but this shed says otherwise. It spent at least 8-9 months on the ground and scored out at 51.75". The main beam is 22" long, which is the best thing about it. The tines go 2.5", 9.5", and 3.75" respectively. It totals 14" of mass which is very weak and the main problem with both his 2 and 3 year old racks. (I am also debating now if he was not 2.5 last year, 3.5 this year. The jury is still out on that one...) Looking at the trail cam pics from last year, it is safe to say both sides where mirror images of one another and he was at least 18" wide, meaning he was roughly 122-125" last year. (The G3 on the right side was a bit longer, but the G2 was probably that much shorter than the other, so I think it was a wash.) It is still hard for me to image that he was that small after looking at these pictures a 1,000 times!!!









My only hope is that now he will survive to continue the quest next season. I feel like the reason I found that shed was one of two things, it is either all I will ever get from him, or it is a precursor to the end which will involve me putting him on my wall. Only time will tell, but the story certainly got better this weekend!!!