00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is just kind of all about crossbows. Love them or hate them, They're here to stay for a while. In the archery industry, even saying the word crossbow was like uttering Voldemort's name in Hogwarts, which is an example you can use if you have kids, but probably shouldn't if you don't. Anyway, cross bowl legalization has gone really well for cross bow enthusiasts, and it seems like it's a matter of time in most states. It's also a very widely adopted weapon that I've learned quite a bit about because of my daughters, which is what I'm going to talk about right now. A year ago, a buddy and I boarded a flight headed toward Orlando. We were headed out on a saltwater fishing trip and we were pretty excited. In addition to the canal fishing in the backyard of our rental house, we were planning to borrow a canoe from a friend of mine who lives down there so we could paddle out to the mangroves and fish. Now, when I say that messing around with saltwater fish in the flats is something I enjoy, I mean it. I rank it right up there with following a good lab around where the pheasants live on the pure fund meter. So we were pretty excited to get down there. Better yet, through that canoe owning friend, we had a trip out to the big water planned. In all of my time in the salt I've never once gone out on the ocean and tried for big fish, so that was extremely exciting. It only got more exciting as we loaded up the boat idled past the jetty and left the land behind. Well, it was exciting for me. My friend immediately started puking, and at one point he leaned over to me while looking almost grinch like because he was so green and I could tell he was in trouble. So I said, you look like you have a two inch grip on a six inch turd. Buddy, to which he responded, it's more like a two ounce grip on a six ounce turd. Then he went back to chumming the water with his breakfast. We caught him mahi mahi right off the bat, which is about as beautiful of a fish as you can see on the end of your line in two hundred feet of clear blue water. After that, we trolled for five hours without a bite, and I realized that deep sea fishing isn't really my jam. I need to cast or jig or somehow just actively fish. It kind of surprised me, but I wouldn't do it again unless I had a hell of a lot more time to waste. When I was around the salt, outdoor opportunities are like that. I remember growing up and talking mad shit about Texas hunters because everything we on the Bloodsport channels was all about some dudes sitting over a feeder or a corn road and seeing more deer in an afternoon than we'd seen in an entire season. I thought you couldn't choose a less ethical way to hunt at the time. Then I went to Texas and I shot some deer on film over feeders and corn roads, and I realized something. It maybe wasn't for me, but I could sure as hell understand why some people would love it. When that feeder goes off, the critters roll in and you see all kinds of cool stuff. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, but as sure as hell wasn't as challenging as a lot of folks want you to think it is. But for me, it just made me understand the appeal, even if it just doesn't quite fill my cup up. As you get older, you bump into a lot more stuff like this in life. This also perfectly sums up my relationship with crossbows. I used to work at bow Hunter Magazine, and if you know anything about the history of that publication, you know that it was a bow hunting magazine and not a crossbow or gun hunting magazine. We fought the good fight against covering crossbows, but the money always wins no matter how principled you are. What I mean by that is that at first, the people who work on commission and sell ads, they come to you and they say, you know, this manufacturer who has supported us for a long time is coming out with a crossbow. And while we don't need to give them editorial love. They are going to buy ads. The slow creep starts then, because once the ads are placed, the first wave of readers loses their minds, but they mostly stick around. So another manufacturer makes a crossbow and more ads show up, and soon your revenue is tied to a category you didn't want anything to do with, and the advertisers know it, so they threaten to pull the budgets. Unless someone goes hunting with a crossbow and writes a story on it, or maybe does a gear review about their latest offering, it never ends, my friends, and that's just how it goes. During that process, quite a few of us were against covering crossbows in any way, we lost because we don't make the big money decisions. There was a long time there where I knew I'd never own a cross bow, and I certainly wouldn't hunt with one. But along came my daughters, one planned and one unplanned, which is the case with most twins. Anyway, when the great State of Wisconsin decided it was best for parents to decide when their kids are ready to start hunting big game instead of the state, I realized that the girls would be able to crossbow hunt over there, and I bought one almost instantly. I mean, whatever resolve I had due to my personal ethics and feelings on the topic evaporated so fast you'd have missed it if you blinked. In fact, I now think that my resolve on the issue might have been thinner than Mark Kenyon's beard to begin with. When we set up that crossbow, which took almost no time, and I sat down first to sit it in at twenty yards, it took three shots before I was worried we'd be shooting off Knox, and I had one of my daughters sit down and shoot it. She and her sister hit bullseyes instantly, and I realized that we had been fed a load of total horseshit from the crossbow industry. You see, that gig I had that bowhunter had me setting up tuning and hunting with like half a dozen bows a year for a decade. It got to the point where I hated setting up bows because I did it so much. Now. A common refrain during the crossbow debates from the pro side is that they are really no different from a vertical bow, but that usually means performance wise, which is also total bs, but setting them up is amazing, and nowhere near the exercise it is with a vertical bow. Now, while I haven't used a ton of them, everyone that I have has not only been super easy to side in, but has also perfectly shot every kind of broadhead I've ever tried to shoot with them. There's so much more consistency in the shot sequence with them that it's almost unbelievable. When you draw a vertical bow, you know you might punch the trigger, you might drop your bow arm, you might flinch just a little, you might can't the bow a tiny bit squeeze, the grip three to is tighter than usual, or maybe you're shooting in a fifteen mile per hour crosswind that takes you from lungs to liver with your aiming point. With a cross blow, your influence on the shot cycle is so much more minimal. They're just worlds apart, and once the bolt is on its way. The argument is that it's lighter weight when compared to a full sized arrow, meaning it's going to shed more kinetic energy and not be as effective at longer ranges. And sure that's true in some scenarios, but the sub forty yard crowd will never know the difference and their reach out and touch them. Crowd has plenty of options, with some crossbows advertising their performance as more like a rifle than a bow. One is just far superior to the other if your goal is to kill a deer easily, and it's not really up for debate, which is also the reason why once crossbows become legal, people tend to use them more than vertical bows. It's not good or bad in my opinion, it's just like objectively the truth, that's where we go as hunters. Now, there are some considerations to make if you're planning to go this route or maybe start out a youngster with a crossbow, and the first is safety. Crossbows have a short power stroke, so they are designed to harness and hold a hell of a lot of energy in a small package. That energy has to go somewhere, and ideally it's going to be transferred to your bolt, but it can also cause wear and tear on your strings and cables and cams and limbs too. Paying attention to those parts matters because when they really start to wear out, they can break on any given shot, and that's no bueno. But there is also the reality that to fire a crossbow, you either have to have it on a good rest, locked into a tripod, or held with both of your hands, and the hand that you put on the forearm is the one you have to worry about. When crossbows first started hitting the scene, a lot of the early adopters found themselves in the er with thumb related injuries. That's why every modern crossbow has a thumb guard built into it, which works really well unless you're like my buddy Scott, who still managed to break his thumb last year on the second crossbow shot of his life. Now, beyond safety, crossbows require a little bit different line of thinking when you're actually hunting for starters. All of that energy they store and then release on the shot also turns into vibration, which is just sound. Crossbows are loud, much louder than vertical bows, and this is something you're probably not gonna notice when you're shooting in your backyard, but you'll notice it in the field on a calm, cold morning, or at least the deer will notice it. At short distances. This is usually a non issue because crossbows are pretty fast, but if you start stretching things out a little, you will notice that the deer are guaranteed to drop at the shot, or at least they will do that even if your eye doesn't register it. My daughter shot a small buck on film two years ago at twenty yards with a crossbow, and when you watch it frame by frame, that little spike probably dropped five inches in the time it took for the trigger to break and the bolt to get there, which is almost no time at all. If you double that distance, you're looking at a potential high lung spine or backstrap shot, maybe a miss who knows, all of which aren't great. Some are far worse than others. A good rule of thumb is to either aim for the center of the heart or at least the top of the heart. This way, if the deer drops, because it will, you'll still be in the good stuff in your margin of error will be well within the range. It'll still give you a short blood trail. It's also a really good idea to use a rest, which might seem super obvious but isn't as simple as it sounds. For anyone who goes from a vertical bow to a crossbow that hang on stand or saddle that you love for your vertical bow hunts will work just fine for your crossbow hunts, but those hang and bang setups generally don't come standard with a good rest. Again, a close shot with you leaned up against the tree as your rest is going to be plenty of steadiness overall. But while crossbows are easy to shoot accurately, they're also kind of heavy and awkward to hold an aim, which means it's not out of the realm of possibility that you might can't the crossbow some or not be as icy in you're aiming an execution as you plan to be. This is one of the things I'm dealing with with my daughters who want to get out of the pop up blinds and sit more natural blinds and tree stands. The natural blinds generally allow for a lightweight tripod, which solves this issue, but tree stands are a different story. The ladder stands with the shooting rail they work just fine, but hang on stands are just tough. That's extra tough for us because I use them a lot and have yet to figure out a great way to get a thirteen year old girl in one in a way in which she can aim really well when a deer shows up, all while not spooking that deer, which is another issue that you might run into if you decide to use a crossbow. When I mentioned they are kind of awkward to carry an aim, I wasn't lying. It's a very common complaint amongst the recently converted, and while it's probably just a matter of reps on the target range and in the field to the point where the comfort level is high, they are also the kind of weapon that doesn't demand a ton of reps. When I'm carrying my daughter's crossbows, it's like I'm almost intentionally trying to make noise with them, whether that's getting into a ladder stand and banging it on the ladder, cocking them in the blind. I'm pretty good at hitting limbs and stocks on random gear, which is rarely a quiet affair. Now here's where I'm going to piss some people off with this, but I don't care. You might have seen recently that Oklahoma has decided that non resident hunters are lower than pond scum and they deserve to be punished as much as possible. That's a separate issue, but one of the driving forces behind the non resident hate is residents who are having a hard time killing deer. I've haunted that state three times, and every time I've had a blast, and I've run into the nicest people I run into hunting anywhere. I actually love Oklahoma, which is why it bums me out so much that I'm probably not going to get to hunt there very much anymore. It's also the state where I happen to run into more crossbow hunters than anywhere else, although Wisconsin and Minnesota are certainly catching up in my experience, and I want to make this clear just to stave off some of the potential hate mail. I'm not saying this is an Oklahoma hunter specific thing. It's a crossbow hunter thing, but it has just been obvious during my hunts down there. Crossbows seem to make hunters think they don't have to work at hunting or try too hard. The setups I saw down there in Oklahoma on my last hunt, and I've seen on previous ones, some of them are so bad, not all of them, but a lot of them. Like think about a camp chair set up with a little bit of camo netting on the ground in woods that are just wide open, or you know, a six foot tall ladder stand facing right where the deer should probably a poach fum. Setups like that just aren't going to work very well on public land deer. The feeling you get with a crossbow is one of holding a gun, especially if you're very used to a vertical bow. But it's not a gun. It's a better version of a bow, so you still need the deer clothes. And if you're going to put your back to a tree Turkey style and expect to shoot a public land bucket twenty yards with your crossbow, you're probably out of luck. Worse, if you think you're going to walk around half an hour before dark and sneak up on one and shoot it, you probably just won't. This is a weapon that still mostly requires bow hunting effort, and I guess I don't know how to put that any other way. You definitely have the advantage of not having to draw when deer or close, which is huge, but you still have to have the deer close and hopefully unaware of your presence. It's not a three to zero eight where you can pull a spencer new Heart and put your back to a fence post out west somewhere and still shoot a good buck because you're just outside of his red zone. You need to be tight, and that requires the right setup, or at least a setup that has enough thought behind it to keep the deer in the dark until it's too late and their lungs are starting to rapidly deflate. There's a lot to consider here. I'm actually pretty agnostic these days on the issue of crossbows. I absolutely get why people want to use them, and I get white people lobby for that. I also get the other side. It's not the same as bowhunting, because if it was, people wouldn't push to include them. It's just a better weapon, at least in the realm of ease of use, and they aren't for everyone. I don't have any interest in hunting with them myself, but I love, love, love taking my daughters out when they're hunting with them. Maybe someday I'll change my tune, probably after my shoulders fall apart and shoot out of my ass while I'm doing something stupid, or maybe there will be a less painful reason. Who can say. I just know that what I thought about them isn't quite what's true, and a lot of what I didn't consider about them is definitely true. They're here to stay, whether you love them or you hate them, whether you're dying to hunt with one or working hard to get your state to stave off the inevitable inclusion that's coming for the last holdouts. It's just something to ponder anyway. It's just a part of deer hunting now and this is a good time of year to think about this stuff as we start to consider some early summer practice sessions and maybe some other gear considerations for the year. So do that and come back next week because I'm gonna drop some more deer knowledge, or at least I'm going to try to. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening, and we have a request coming down from the top, which only makes sense if you do what we do. If you're not subscribed to Wired to Hunt, please do that. That helps us a lot. Maybe head on over to Clay's feed and subscribe there. Maybe just run the gamut of meat eater feeds would help us greatly and keep the C suite people off of our asses. Anyway, if you're looking for some new hunt content, maybe some new fishing content. 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