Elite Series angler, son team up to tag huge Mississippi Delta main-frame 8-point

Washington County buck has four stickers that push green score to more than 165 inches Boone & Crockett.

Hard to decide the No. 1 reason why this particular buck, a massive main-frame 8-point, means so much to B.A.S.S. Elite Series angler Greg Hackney of Gonzalez, La.

The list is pretty long, beginning with the fact that fishing pro was sitting right beside his 12-year-old son Andrew when the younger Hackney pulled the trigger and knocked the big deer down.

Then there’s the buck’s green score, a whopping 165 3/8 inches as measured by a certified Boone & Crockett scorer — not bad for an 8-point with four stickers.

And, finally, the Washington County buck was a total surprise.

“We keep pretty good track of the bucks on our club, which is up on the Arkansas and Louisiana border next to the Mississippi River,” said the elder Hackney, who explained that the club actually has land in three states. The buck was killed in a small portion that is in Mississippi. “We have a lot of trail cams out, and just about everybody takes a camera to the stand. We literally have thousands of pictures of deer on that property. We track our bucks very closely. We know what we have.

“But, nobody, and I mean nobody, in our club or on the neighboring property — and they have a lot of photos — has ever seen this buck or a photo of him. He was 7 years old, so he’s been around and big for a few years. I guess if he has ever been seen, it had to be several years ago before he grew up. If you’d have ever seen him, you wouldn’t have forgotten him.”

He was big, field dressing at 195 pounds (estimated live weight exceeds 235 pounds).

His rack was long and wide: The greatest inside spread was 21 ½ inches, and both main beams surpassed 26 inches.

The rack was thick: He had nearly 40 inches of mass measurements, which Hackney correctly pointed out is “a lot for an 8-point with only three places on each antler to take circumference measurements.”

He had character: His G2s, both of which were 9 1/2 inches long, accounted for all four sticker points. Both split to form two stickers, and then the stickers split to make two more points.

“Like I said, anybody who had seen him would have remembered him,” Hackney said. “He was amazing. About the only thing he lacked was tine size, like you’d expect with high-scoring 8 points.”

It’s not like the buck hadn’t been moving around. In 2011, the club was fully involved in the record Mississippi River flood. In 2012, the club was also impacted by the drought that dropped the river to record low levels.

“He’s been through a lot, you know, and that just adds to the history of nobody seeing this buck,” Hackney said. “So you know I was surprised when I looked up and saw him that afternoon in the stand.”

Adding to the amazement was that Hackney had basically given up on the hunt, thinking he and his son had missed the only chance they’d get at a shooter buck. But, let’s start the hunt at the beginning.

“We’d been at the club four days, taping a show for ‘Sportsman TV,’ and we’d had a heck of a week,” Hackney said. “My dad was there, and he and my son Andrew had been hunting together while I was with a cameraman. I killed a nice 8-point on film with a .444 primitive weapon for a show that should air next fall.

“The weather had gotten right, and the bucks were at the peak of chasing does. It was perfect. I guess in four days, we probably saw 50 bucks —and I’m betting that is a conservative number. It would have been a great hunt even if Andrew hadn’t gotten this buck.”

Hackney had wrapped up the taping that morning, and, after his dad had left to go home, he decided to take Andrew out that afternoon in search of an 8-point that he’d been chasing all week.

“There was a good 8 down there that I had been hunting, and I thought we might slip up on him,” Hackney said. “I chose an area that nobody had been to in at least two weeks, and it’s in an area that doesn’t get a lot of pressure. We went to a stand that is in a 2-year-old food plot.”

When he said “in” the food plot, he wasn’t kidding.

“In hindsight, this was not good stand planning,” Hackney said, laughing. “It is in a group of trees right in the middle of the food plot. It is awful because you are wide open. You can be seen from anywhere in that field or near that field. You have to be real careful.

“When we got up in it, I got Andrew to lay down on the floor because he has a tendency to move a lot in a stand, and in that stand you can’t move at all if deer are around. He was actually able to see out a crack in the stand and see the back corner of the field that I couldn’t see. I was scrunched down on the seat, basically looking with one eye.”

It was enough to see a lot of deer come into the food plot.

“They were coming in almost immediately, about a dozen, including a small 8 in the field that was chasing does,” Hackney said. “About an hour before we shot the big buck, I saw another big buck coming at us. I couldn’t move much, but I could see he was a shooter and he was coming at us. Next time I looked at him I could see his tail and backside leaving. I don’t know what spooked him; I don’t know if he saw something, didn’t like the stand or if he got our wind, but he turned and left.

“Man, I figured that was it for us. You usually only get one opportunity on a shooter buck, and we’d lost that. I was already planning what we’d do on our next hunt the next morning. You know how it is.”

But they were stuck in the stand in the wide open and decided to ride out the afternoon and see what happened.

“We still had all those does and small bucks in the field, and I mean some where real close, like 10 paces,” Hackney said. “We couldn’t move, but eventually I noticed that all the deer in the field kept looking back in the woods. They would feed, and then look back. That’s how I first saw the buck. I looked where they were looking, and down in the bottom near this drain in the cottonwoods was this big buck.

“I didn’t recognize him, but I knew he was a shooter. He was about 150 yards and was walking around the edge of the field. Big bucks like that, mature and all, they don’t make mistakes and he wasn’t walking into that field. He was checking out the deer but staying in the timber.”

The Hackneys were not in a good shooting position, and achieving it would take an assist — and, they got it from the big buck. He had the attention of all the deer in the field, and the hunters used that to their advantage.

“Whenever I saw all the deer looking at him, I was able to quietly get Andrew up off of the floor and the gun to his shoulder out the window,” Hackney said. “The buck was in an opening, and Andrew knocked him down with a single shot from my .300 Weatherby.”

No need for the 12-year-old to get overwhelmed by buck fever.

“You have to understand, this is Andrew’s second buck to measure 150 or more and his fourth over 140 inches,” the proud papa said. “He’s had some great experiences and knows what to do.”

Hackney has trained both his sons — he has another son Luke, who is 9 — to handle the high-caliber rifle.

“We hunt some big bucks in some tough places, and I want to have knockdown power,” he said. “But the gun is ported, so the kick is more like that of a 20-gauge shotgun. It is louder because of the ports, but we all wear hearing protection.”

Hackney called the hunt one of his most memorable.

“It was just perfect,” he said. “It was kind of like Andrew’s killing this buck was just a bonus.”

A big bonus.

Click here to read about other big bucks killed this season.

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