Second Chance: Ohio Bowhunter Arrows Buck of a Lifetime

Matt Goreschel had a big problem. The stone quarry where he hunted was being annexed into the city in 2019, and that would be the end of hunting there. Once that happened, it would be against the law to launch any projectile there, eliminating the option for either gun or bowhunting. Access to big Ohio bucks can come at a premium, so he needed to find a work around to the regulations or face searching for another place to enjoy his passion.

Matt learned there was a process to gain an exemption and decided to go for it. But what sounded simple at first turned into a long and tedious process. There was nothing easy about his endeavor. The twists and turns as he worked his way through the system might have discouraged most, but he was a man on a mission.

His first stop was the town Safety Director, who gave him leads on how he would need to proceed. He also visited the Fire Chief and met with the Mayor. Matt soon learned that dealing with the City Council required patience; this was not going to happen overnight. He needed to educate them and provide evidence to support his pleading.

To start, he began researching and interviewing. Insurance documentation on deer/vehicle collisions and crop damage reports from local farmers helped him paint the picture of what could be expected if whitetails were not hunted.

“In the big scheme of things, this was not a priority to them. So, I also had to keep pushing it back onto their agenda,” Matt says. After four years, and countless appearances before the governing body, he got the exemption. “They had to vote three times before they allowed it,” he adds. “But my persistence got it done!”

In the meantime, Matt had been keeping his eyes on a deer that had given him the incentive to keep fighting his way through the bureaucracy. He had spotted the buck years earlier. And while he couldn’t hunt it, he had collected hundreds of photos and four years of left side sheds. In 2019, the buck, then just a good 8-point, had the look of one to keep an eye on. Two years later, he had developed splits on his G-2s and G-3s and heavy mass. He looked like he could develop into a 200-incher, or bigger, and it was beginning to look like time was on Matt’s side.

Matt’s lobbying paid off near the end of the 2022-23 season. With only a few days left to hunt, he decided to wait until the following fall, using that time to plan how he would hunt the buck rather than rush in. Over the summer, he monitored the deer with cell cameras, and he used the HuntStand App to pattern the buck’s movement. He bushhogged some lanes and hung some stands, prepping for the beginning of bow season.

“I got a really good handle of where he spent most of his time on the property,” he continues. “Then he started growing drop tines!” The long wait had allowed the buck plenty of time to mature, and now he was showing full potential.

The giant buck and several others were living in an approximately 4-acre patch of honeysuckle. Matt moved his cameras around until he figured out how the deer moved from there to feed in a nearby soybean field. “Thor’s Hammer,” as the buck was called, was passing through a weeded field with scattered, very small cottonwood trees. This left Matt no good place to hang a stand. “It was so wide open that I was going to stand out like a sore thumb,” he continues. “But I finally came up with something I thought would work.”

Matt squeezed a climber onto a tree barely big enough to support his weight, where only his head showed above the honeysuckle. He was just a few yards off the trail. “I knew I would see him, but I had to get past a bunch of other bucks first.”

On October 7, Matt settled into his hideaway late in the afternoon. Not long after, the first of the bachelor group began filing by. “After the first few bucks passed, I knew I was going to get away with my plan,” Matt chuckles. “And about an hour before dark, he stepped out.”

Matt stopped the buck and took his shot. “I saw the lighted nock disappear into his hide, but it looked a little low,” the hunter recounts. And the deer had a very unusual reaction. Instead of blowing out of there, he bolted forward, tucked his tail and slowly walked off. A follow up inspection of the arrow showed dark blood. “I decided to back out and give him 14 hours after that,” Matt adds.

The next morning was a real bust. The blood trail looked promising at first, then went to nothing after 65 yards. Matt decided to call in a dog. And when that search failed, he brought in another tracking team from Michigan with two dogs. But the outcome of both searches was the same . . . no buck! They had beat the whole area to death, and the giant deer had just disappeared.

The camera appearances went flatline, and Matt was concerned that the deer might have wandered off the property and expired. Then, on October 10, he got a photo of the buck on a trail camera a half-mile away. The buck seemed healthy. What was going on?

The next two weeks showed random movement, so Matt decided to get back into the core area and hunt a stand he had set up near the bedding area earlier in the year.

On Halloween morning, Matt was in that stand getting his grunt call and rattling antlers out of his bag when he heard something moving nearby. “I turned to look but didn’t see anything,” Matt recalls. “So, I went back to what I was doing.”

Then, he heard it again. But this time Matt spotted the drop-tined giant moving in the brush just 25 yards away. It was too thick to pass an arrow through, but the buck was approaching a junction in a trail which could leave him exposed. Then, the deer turned back into the honeysuckle and headed away.

Matt grunted twice to turn him around. The mega buck responded instantly, blowing through the thicket and passing his stand again with no chance of a shot. The deer kept going until Matt lost sight of him. With nothing to lose, Matt called to him again. And the buck came charging back!

But this time, the buck was on a mowed path, and his number was up. The buck was now 20 yards away, and Matt could see a hole in the cover ahead that he could thread an arrow through. So, he drew and held on that spot. “I was thinking, aim small, miss small,” Matt recounts. When the buck was at a mere six yards, the bowhunter sent the shaft free and watched the lighted nock disappear into grey hide. After the buck bolted away, Matt could see that nock now stuck in the ground.

“I grabbed my phone and started texting my buddies,” Matt recalls. “I have good news and bad news, I told them. The giant is down, and the state of Ohio is going to be a lot harder for anyone in the Buck Quest contest!” Upon recovery, Matt discovered entry and exit wounds which were healed over from the previous shot. The shape of those holes made it obvious that the mechanical broadhead he’d used had not deployed. The arrow had somehow passed through his body without doing any major damage. Unbelievable!

This great, mature Buckeye buck gross scores 219 5/8 inches non-typical and features heavy mass, plenty of stickers, drop tines and heavy beading extending from the bases far up the beams — a fitting reward for this hunter’s many years of hard work.

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