195-Inch Worth County Buck Is Real Deal

If you have a mobile phone, you’ve probably seen by now pictures of an awesome buck, but the details you’ve heard of where the buck was killed likely depend on where you hunt and who texted the picture. Here are the facts.

The Georgia buck was killed in Worth County yesterday, Nov. 2, by Shannon Sledge, of Ty Ty.

Shannon told GON the buck had been seen on his dairy farm for the past three years, and his buddy Roger White Jr., aka “Skippy,” had been hunting the buck. Skippy works on the dairy.

“He hunted that deer for three years and never saw him while hunting him in the daylight, never got a daylight picture,“ Shannon said. “This was right here on our dairy. We only have maybe 25 acres of woods on the farm, and that little head where the buck lived was maybe 10 acres. I never hunt my place because I didn’t want to intrude on his hunting. Hunting there was just like a fringe benefit for him. He’s put cameras out all over, and we had said that he needed to kill the buck this year or something else was going to happen to him.

“So he calls me up yesterday, and he says, ‘I just saw him.’ This was at 11 o’clock. When I got finished with what I was doing with my work, I came back home, and he’s got the climbers ready. I said, ‘Man, it’s 1:30 in the afternoon—I can’t sit all day. I just can’t do it.’

“He said, ‘If you’d seen that big son of a gun, you could.’

“So we feel like he may still be bedding in this little head of woods. We work out a plan. I’m supposedly going to Point A, which is north of where he’s gonna go in the woods. Well, there was a man picking cotton up there, so I went to Point B, the next place where we think he might cross this powerline that runs through there. We walk in together on the powerline, and I’ve got my shotgun and my rifle—I’m prepared for this deer to cross,” Shannon said with a laugh. “He’s got his climber and his rifle.”

“When we’re walking in on the powerline, there’s a little creek, a little draw. I saw some big tracks, and I said, ‘This is where I’m going to set up.’ Then I didn’t feel comfortable about that spot. I couldn’t see very far, so I walked a little farther and saw a big trail and said, ‘This is where he’s going to cross.’

“So I get set up, and I’ve got my shotgun and my rifle. Skippy goes on up about 50 yards ahead of me, and he turns and walks in close to where we think he’s bedding up. Just like we planned, he walks in, and out comes this big son of a gun. You couldn’t have planned it any better.

“He came straight at me, and I shot him with my rifle… I should say, I shot at him. He didn’t slow up. So I grabbed my shotgun, and I unloaded three rounds of 00 Buck. He didn’t go 50 yards.

“It was just a crazy event,” Shannon said. “But a buck like that, we might not have ever killed him hunting traditionally.

“I always called it Skippy’s deer,” Shannon said. “I felt bad. I hated that I killed it, but he was happy for me. He really was.”

Word soon spread among their friends, and lots of pictures were taken as folks gathered at Shannon’s farm. Tye Cottle, a GON subscriber from Tifton, put a tape on the antlers.

“I just measured horns, and it was dark and we were shining flashlights trying to do it real quick,” Ty said. “I got 196ish. I know there will be deductions all that, and I wasn’t trying to be exact, but I know he’s in the 190s.”

GON readers might recognize Shannon from last year’s Truck-Buck contest. Shannon won the Week 1 South category with a Turner County Pope & Young buck, and Shannon competed in the Truck-Buck Shoot-Out at the Outdoor Blast hunting show in Duluth.