My dad and I tagged out this morning at 7:10 am, both jakes, but it was a fun and exciting hunt! Story and pics to come when i get home tomorrow. Good luck to everyone who is still hunting!
Here’s the recap of our MI hunt:
My dad got to the area we hunt, just east of Escanaba, Wednesday evening a few hours before sunset and set out to the area we hunt for a couple hours of scouting. I on the other hand left the cities at the same time he was arriving at the hunting grounds, so I was a little jealous and wanted to get there as fast as I could. My haste led me to miss one of my exits and I drove about 30 miles out of the way which added an hour to my already 6 hour drive. Good times!
My dad found a flock of 15+ birds with a couple nice toms and a handful of jakes on the property adjacent to the farm we hunt and watched them head into a big stand of softwoods. Satisfied that they were heading to bed, he backed out and headed for the hotel to catch some Z’s of his own. I was still 4+ hours away…..again, good times!
I showed up at the hotel at 1 am eastern time, crawled into bed and waited for the alarm to go off in a little over 3 hours. Our plan was to hunt out of a pop-up blind for the first time, so we wanted a few extra minutes to get set up. The plan of attack was to set the blind in a corn field, use a few decoys and call the birds from the adjacent farm. We reached the field almost an hour before legal shooting time, set the blind up and I went out to set the decoys. I had 2 jakes, 1 hen and a Primos full strut silhouette. I put the hen and a jake to the right side of the blind (dad’s window) and the other jake and silhouette on my side. We crawled into the blind, dad poured some coffee and we waited till the woods started to come alive.
Legal shooting time was 6:12 and we started to hear some clucks and gobbles at about 6. Dad is great with a mouth call and I like glass, so we started doing our best imitations of a hen looking for love. We talked with the flock for 15-20 minutes before we saw movement out dad’s window. It was a jake about 100 yards out and not really interested in our calls or the decoys and I was starting to second guess my decoy spread. Nonetheless we kept flirting with the birds we could still hear gobbling and it wasn’t long before I saw 3 birds heading our way from about 150 yards. I grabbed the binocs and glassed them, 3 jakes running straight at us.
Dad wondered if we were shooting jakes, and after a little deliberation, we decided we would if we had the chance. It’s a tough decision when you only have 1.5 days to hunt, pay for an out of state tag and have some nasty weather moving in in the afternoon.
By now the jakes had closed the distance to about 50 yards and were B-lining for the primos silhouette for a little tag team action on that big tom. It only took them 5 minutes tops to close that 150 yard distance and before we new it they were in his face and ready to fight.
While they were working their way across a downed fence, dad and I had our barrels out the windows and were ready for our opportunity. One of the jakes was a little ballsier than the other 2 and stayed in the face of the silhouette while the other 2 decided to take on the easier target, the jake. When they headed for the jake we counted to 3 and dropped them both. As my dad always does, he looked at his watch, 7:01 am and the hunt was over.
My dad and I are going to be hunting this am 
