Mike Handley posted on July 11, 2011 07:13
By Mike Handley
Calling J.T. Kreager lucky within earshot of anyone who knows him would be like waking to discover you’ve inadvertently Tweeted photographs of your underwear to Oprah. You’re going to be left red-faced.
Yes, the Ohio bowhunter was in the right place at the right time to put an arrow through a world-class whitetail last season. The hunt was short and sweet, ending his season just two days out of the chute -- the first of which was spent beside his 11-year-old daughter as she drilled a deer for the second time in her life.
But the guy didn’t spin a bottle or roll a dice. He didn’t walk to the nearest stand in street clothes with a banged-up bow after frying bacon or pumping gas. The deer’s face wasn’t in a bucket of apples, and there was nobody driving deer toward him.
J.T. knew which of many stands on many farms offered the best chance at a giant during the unseasonable (and much hoped for) northeasterly wind. It happened to be one he’d hung at his most recent acquisition, which had yielded many trail cam photographs of the wide-racked buck he most wanted.
Co-owner of a small manufacturing company in Delaware, Ohio, and the man behind three hunting-oriented websites, J.T. has plenty of time to pursue whitetails in the fall, and he’s almost fanatical about it. His obsession with scent control -- wind, showers, sprays and Scent Lok -- borders on OCD, and he amasses hunting rights by knocking on more doors than a candidate for city council.
J.T. was 20 feet up a tree before 3 p.m. that Sunday. After three hours of enjoying a deerless tranquility, a group of does led the 10-pointer on his most-wanted list to within 15 yards. After the thwack, the deer jumped the fence and ran 50 yards into the hay field, where it collapsed and died.
Except for a 1 6/8-inch-long point at the base of the right P3, the buck is an otherwise clean 10-pointer. The single irregularity isn’t long enough to kick the rack into the typical category, so it remains a Perfect, the third best ever arrowed in Ohio.
Its official BTR score is 172. With the 24 4/8-inch inside included, we’re talking 196 4/8, a mark very few mature whitetails hit without benefit of more typical points, stickers and kickers.
You can read the rest of the story in an upcoming issue of RACK magazine. Like so many others involving colossal deer from Ohio and Pennsylvania, this one is courtesy of BTR master scorer Ed Waite.