'Homer' Hunters

 

Anchored up fishing boat with crew on shore

Prior to our hunting trip to North Shuyak I had high hopes for good deer hunting. I'd seen plenty of deer up there grazing in the fields when I surveyed the area in the spring. And a friend who spends a lot of time up there in summer told me there are always lots of deer in that area. I also talked to pilots and they told me they never fly people up there to go deer hunting.  I even talked to some kodiak commercial fishermen that I know and they also said they rarely fish the north coast of Shuyak. So I had high hopes of finding lots of deer that had never been hunted before.

Boy was I wrong! On arrival we saw a fishing boat anchored up just off shore, and then we later found fresh hunter tracks and even a picnic campfire still burning.  We watched the hunters motor back to their boat. By the fire there was even a meat pole for hanging meat.  But it did not look recently used and we thought just one hunting party would not effect the hunting.

And then we hiked and hiked saw just one deer.  We hiked about 18 mikes, glassed the landscape with binoculars looking for deer and saw just one doe that quickly ran away. That's pretty bad deer hunting.  We also found very little fresh deer tracks.  There was plenty of old deer sign; there were deer tails everywhere.  But the trails had not been used in the last couple of weeks.

And then on the last day another group of hunters walked by our camp.  They were friendly and they had not seen any deer either.  And the coin dropped - Commercial fishermen from the Kenai Peninsula were hunting on shore while they let their fishing gear 'soak'.  It seems that this is a very popular thing to do for fishermen out of home ports on the Kenai Peninsula.  There are no deer on the Kenai Peninsula so they get their deer on Shuyak - the closest place with any deer. And this year they have hunted the Perevalnie Passage area HARD and all the deer ran away.

Patrick

Hunting picnic firewire and meat pole