Prior to 2018, only four bucks with 30-plus-inch inside spreads were listed in Buckmasters Whitetail Trophy Records. Now there’s a fifth, and it’s wider than all of them.
Isaac Yoder, a 25-year-old Amish farrier living in Bethesda, Ohio, felled the latest. It took him two seasons, two gentlemen’s agreements and two arrows to seal the deal.
Isaac first saw the wide-racked buck one evening in July 2017. While gazing at a field from his new front porch, he made an impromptu decision to take his binoculars across the road and do some glassing.
He saw the animal’s body first, just over a crest in the field.
“At first, it would never lift its head,” Isaac said. “When it finally did, I started shaking. I went home almost immediately because I didn’t want to spook the deer.”
He attained permission to hunt the tract from a neighbor in exchange for shoeing the man’s 12 horses, but he didn’t get a shot that fall. He secured the rights to the neighboring land prior to the 2018 season by planting food plots and building stands for the owner.
He named the deer 747 for obvious reasons.
On Nov. 8, Isaac hunted a funnel near the buck’s suspected bedding area. He walked 80 yards off the nearest field and was in place an hour before daylight. He’d hunted that setup the previous evening, but he abandoned it when he realized the wind was wrong.
At 8:00, Isaac saw his buck in a food plot. In time, it made its way to the scrape about 18 yards away from his stand. Worried the overhead branches might deflect his arrow, he waited for the right opportunity, which proved to be a smart decision.
After it worked the scrape, the buck came to the base of Isaac’s tree. The hunter wound up taking an almost straight-down shot with his Mathews bow.
The arrow that turned out the deer’s lights was meant to do so. Isaac had written “747” on it months earlier.
The buck scores 182 3/8 on the BTR scale, thanks largely to its 32 7/8-inch inside spread. It’ll be featured in Rack magazine this fall.
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