Public Land Giant Claims Tennessee’s No. 3 BP Spot
By Mike Handley
When Josh Robbins gave up his deer lease on the Tennessee-Kentucky border, he knew his opportunities to put venison in the freezer were going to be limited in 2024. That’s really the only reason he put in for the blackpowder draw hunt on public ground an hour and a half from his home.
He hadn’t visited the Rhea County tract in 15 years.
Both he and his 20-year-old son, Brady, were among the 150 hunters awarded permits for the late October hunt.
A week prior to the two-day hunt, Josh and two of his three sons scouted the less popular side of the WMA. Aware that most hunters choose to hunt the more easily accessible and historically productive portions, the Robbinses ventured deep into the stepchild area.
“If you want to take a deer off public land, it’s more about outsmarting other people,” says the 49-year-old field engineer.
Because the lack of deer sign was discouraging, the Robbins boys decided to explore the other side, across a river.
“We found one arm-sized rub over there,” he said. “It wasn’t much, but we’d found nothing in the first place we looked.”
Josh and Brady, his middle son, drove down on Thursday and got a motel room 15 minutes away, to make it easier to be in place before the crowd arrived.
“I didn’t want to have to race there from Madisonville to get ahead of everybody,” he said.
Josh’s plan was to stay away from the fields normally used by hunters to access the woods. He wanted to approach the area from the rear, even if it meant plowing through brambles — one way to get ahead of the orange army, many of whom were staying at the check station campsite.
“I was hoping other hunters would push deer toward us,” he reasoned. “Also, we’d planned to stay out all day, so the lunchtime traffic might also get deer on their feet.”
That tactic worked when he was there 15 years earlier, when the area had been logged. Those former clearcuts, which afforded views of deer all day long, were now thick with trees and brush. Visibility was now limited to 80 yards at best.
“Neither of us expected to shoot more than a couple of does, if we were lucky. Brady’s not like most 20-year-olds. He’s old-school picky. But even he had lowered his standards,” Josh said.
When he and Brady headed afield on Oct. 25, Josh was lugging a climbing stand, while Brady was carrying a tree-saddle.
The morning was slow. At one point, Brady texted his father, asking if he’d seen anything, since the only wildlife he was seeing were birds and squirrels. The young man eventually glimpsed a deer heading in his father’s direction, but it never showed on the other end.
At 10:30, Josh saw antlers. The buck was only 40 yards from him, approaching from the opposite direction — private land — that he’d expected, walking into instead of away from the pressure.
“As it came closer, I just concentrated on keeping my cool,” he admitted.
The deer sped away after the shot.
“I’ve never seen a deer run faster in my life,” he said. “I didn’t know if I’d hit it, but it sure didn’t look good. I thought, How did I mess this up?”
Self-doubt evaporated when Josh heard a loud crash and saw small trees shaking. Brady heard the crash, too.
Father and son met in the woods between them moments later, expecting to find the deer, but it was nowhere in sight.
“I realized I had to calm down, to pretend I hadn’t heard anything and just go back and follow the blood trail,” Josh said.
Soon, they were standing wide-eyed over the incredible deer.
“We acted like 3-year-olds, jumping up and down and high-fiving,” he said. “Everything after that is mostly a blur.
“I left Brady at the deer while I went back to the truck to retrieve the two-wheeled deer hauler. When I got to the vehicle, I was so sweaty that I stripped down and changed into some other clothes,” he continued.
“I encountered one other hunter along the way, and he asked if I’d killed anything. I said yes, a big one, and he asked if it was an 8- or a 6-pointer. When I told him it was more like 30 points, he didn’t believe me.
“‘So you killed a 30-pointer?” the man smirked.
Getting the deer out of the woods didn’t go smoothly. One of the cart’s wheels came off when its cotter pin was knocked loose. Josh had to trim a green branch, bend and tie it around the axle to keep the wheel in place, and then proceed slowly over the smoothest terrain he could find.
When the Robbinses reached the check station, a crowd of about 50 encircled his truck. By the time he got home, the buck was all over social media, including the tndeer website, which is where he later connected with hunters who had trail camera images of his deer.
One person even had one of the animal’s shed antlers.
“It was a true hunt, full of memories,” Josh said. “I guess you could say it’s an old-fashioned story, a throwback hunt to the days before the advent of cell cams.”
Hunter Schmittou measured the 31-pointer for Buckmasters, arriving at an incredible 236 5/8 inches. The rack is a mainframe 5x5 with 94 5/8 inches of abnormal growth, enough for the state’s No. 3 spot among muzzleloader-felled Irregulars.