The buck was only 50 yards away, but we couldn’t get him on camera. Anyone ever have this happen to you? It’s frustrating to say the least. You spend all year working on getting your stands prepped and lanes trimmed open, and then forget one thing. Now not everyone has a camera person in tow with them in the fall, but maybe you take someone else into the stand with you so they can just watch. The biggest lesson learned this last weekend was to make sure that the other stand is trimmed out so they can see as well.
As it turned out, the stand I was in was higher than the “shooters” stand which in turn blocked everything for the camera. We had a big 150 class ten point come in and start to annihilate the trees. He was ripping vines out of the trees, snorting, and was trying to impress the doe that happened to be standing in front of us. The only problem we had was that none of this was getting on camera because of being so much higher than the shooter. Most of my other stands I never had a problem with this, but in this one stand I didn’t trim a whole lot because of being so close to the bedding areas of the big bucks.
Needless to say, the best advice I can give when hanging multiple stands in one tree is to try to keep the stand where you would be looking over the shoulder of the shooter, and not looking down on them. While the weekend was great, it was a bit of heartbreak to not get some of the best memories on camera to share with everyone. Here are the few pointers I can give when hanging multiple stands-
– Make sure you trim out both stands for the best possible footage, not just one
– Make sure the camera arm has plenty of clearance
– Don’t hang the stands to far apart
– Make sure you are in a quality tree and not just a tree that will work
– Be safe and don’t risk anything just to get that second stand up
– Have fun with the process
That last point I think is the most over looked detail. So that is a must to be on the list! Stay tuned to Victory Outdoors as I hope to bring you many videos of the big bucks we have been seeing!
