GON Youth Big-Buck Contest Winner Collects At Adventure Outdoors, Woods-N-Water

Cody Gay spent 300 hours on this Ware County buck, but it was worth it. It allowed him to win a week in the GON Youth Big-Buck Contest, which led to Cody winning the 2023 Shoot-Out. That victory awarded him a $3,000 shopping spree at Adventure Outdoors and a three-day deer hunt at Woods-N-Water with his dad.

FAQ: what does it take to harvest a whitetail big enough to qualify for GON’s Youth Big-Buck Shoot-Out? Well, you can always get lucky. But Cody Gay, the 2023 Youth Shoot-Out winner, has provided a better answer: 300 hours on the trail of one—and only one—shooter.

His dad, Ronnie, has seen this happen before on the family’s Ware County farm.

“Once he makes his mind up, he’s all in,” Ronnie says. “He hunts right and is not going to shoot anything else but the one he decided shoot. It’s all in what you want. There are deer here to kill, but if you want to kill big deer, you can’t shoot all the rest. We don’t have a hit-lister this year, so he might not even kill a deer.”

If those names, Ronnie and Cody Gay, ring a bell, it’s not surprising.

“Cody’s name is all over the Truck-Buck Shoot-Out records, and all of those deer have been off our place in the northern (agricultural) end of the county,” Ronnie relates. “He has always enjoyed the GON magazine, even from being a little kid. My name is in there a time or two; I have the McIntosh County record bow-kill. I always put his deer in every year for Truck Buck and y’all do a great job of putting in pictures of deer when kids kill one, so the magazine is always great for younger hunters and fishermen.

“He’s just a super good kid, and loves anything to do with hunting and fishing.”

Cody’s first showing (after the 2021 season) in the Youth Shoot-Out left him disappointed—and quite determined to do better. Age-wise, he had one more year in the Youth category and was determined to make the most of it. A measure of his dedication is revealed in the fact that his high grades at Ware County High School—where he’s also on the fishing team—enabled him to exempt a few finals. The reward was a couple of days out of school, better spent in the woods. Now a 17-year-old senior, he’s headed to Georgia Southern University to study electrical engineering.

Ronnie continues.

“We had a good buck we had been watching on camera at home that was the biggest deer we had, plus it was the only one that just may get him in the contest. He literally passed up every deer on our place to try and kill this one. On one of those exempt days, I was out of town and my wife (Theresa, a nurse in Waycross) was at work, so he was at home by himself. But if he got the deer down, he’s big enough to handle it.”

Ronnie works for CSX Transportation—think large trains. More on that later, and you don’t want to miss it.

Cody’s target was now clearly defined. But big bucks are seldom easy; bucks don’t get big otherwise.

“I had seen this deer early in October, got a couple of pictures of it, and knew that it was the one I wanted,” Cody says. “It was a constant: every chance I got to go where I had set up my tripod stand, I had to make sure I had the right wind and that I didn’t bugger any deer on the way in, slipping around as quiet and easy as possible. I kept up with the hunts, and figured I had over 300 hours chasing this one deer. The stand was in a creek bottom, with a thick bedding area, canopy overhead giving a ton of shade. Other than that, it’s real open in there; you can see 200 yards in some sections.”

In the dawning of Dec. 14, 2022, all that work was about to pay off.

“That morning I got in about 45 minutes before daylight with no interruptions. There was good deer movement for that late in the season, including a couple small bucks that I usually see in there. About 8:45, a little button buck worked his way to about 10 yards under my stand, and then I heard something off to my left. Well, there was a squirrel in there all the time, every trip, so I thought that’s what it was.”

Only, this time, it wasn’t the squirrel. Guess who?

“My wind was actually blowing right toward him. He checked that bedding area and started walking right to it. The buck was about 45 yards to my left and then headed straight to the creek almost in a mad dash.

“He was MOVING, and I was freaking out! I got buck fever because I knew this was my only opportunity. I threw my rifle up, but that knothead saw me and went to blowing and stomping right under the stand. For some reason, when that one blew, it stopped the big one dead in his tracks, and he did a 180 right back to me. I don’t know if he thought the little one was messing with him or what—and I don’t care.

“I had my rifle up and already had it pointed to where I was going to shoot. I had messed up one time before, but he walked in pretty as could be and got to 35 to 40 yards quartering to but broadside. I bleated at him, stopped him and pulled the trigger.”

The Winchester .350 Legend round blew through a shoulder and the buck dropped about 45 yards from where he had stood. En route, Cody said, “He sounded like a bull going through there, limbs and brush flying!”

And here’s an interesting note for all of us trying to keep tabs on which buck is where when.

“I went and checked a camera after I killed this buck, and he was on it in a green field about half a mile away at 7:45,” Cody recalls. “At five after nine, he was in front of my stand in a creek bottom getting shot.”

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That buck did indeed prove to be a weekly winner in GON’s Youth contest, and we got to see Cody again. By virtue of going on to best the competition in his second Youth Shoot-Out, his prizes included a $3,000 shopping spree at Adventure Outdoors in Smyrna and a three-day deer hunt with Woods-N-Water at the Wrightsville location.

Lounging at the lodge with Cody, Ronnie and Woods-N-Water head honcho Blaine Burley, I asked our winner about his Adventure Outdoors haul.  It all came out in one sentence: “A Browning X Bolt .270 with a Leupold Scope, a two-pack of Moultrie cell cameras, a rifle carrying case by Drake, a Drake duck bag, waders and two boxes of .270 shells!”

And Ronnie chimed in, “And I didn’t even get a pocket knife!”

But he, too, has a plan. After outgrowing the Youth Shoot-Out contest, Cody’s next little item on the agenda is winning a new Chevy truck in GON’s Truck-Buck contest. It’s a toss-up who keeps the keys!

The Woods-N-Water hunt was delayed, but booked around GON’s annual rut map for the area, and for three days, father and son put in their time.

Here’s how Cody remembers it.

“Sunday afternoon, we met my guide and went over all the rules, getting on the same page as far as deer size and what to take if I got a shot.

“The next morning, we went in about 5:45 to a stand on a powerline, walking in with the moonlight as our flashlights. We saw a deer probably 10 minutes before shooting light, and it looked like a cow! It appeared to be a buck making a scrape, but it was just too early to risk taking a shot when we couldn’t be sure. We stayed ‘til about 11 and saw six or seven more, feeding and moving, scurrying across that powerline. They didn’t waste any time in that open area. Hit the same spot that evening, saw a couple of the same deer.

“The next morning we went to a different spot and saw a couple of deer, just big does and a couple young bucks, back that evening and saw two deer before it started raining a little; the deer weren’t as active as they had been that morning.

“On the third morning, we went to a stand on the ground, in an area a big buck had showed up on camera a couple days earlier but saw does and a couple of bucks with no size. Our last afternoon we went to a spot among some fruit trees. A medium-sized doe came running out, stopped and looked back like she was being chased, and I got fired up for a minute, but nothing turned up.”

And then, the kicker: “I had already missed two days of school at that point, and mama wasn’t getting too happy about that.”

Cody Gay used some of his Adventure Outdoors gear to hunt at Woods-N-Water last month.

The worst part, to me, was that Blaine was sending me pictures every day of hunters knocking down bruisers on each of the three locations Woods-N-Water hunts, from Sandersville to Irwinton to Wrightsville. I was pulling hard for Cody, but he didn’t have 300 hours to put in on this trip. It’s called hunting, and, this time, there’ll be no powder burnt; time to load up, boys.

I thought of his recollections: every stand, every deer. He’s not likely to forget very soon.

And then I asked Ronnie about his.

“I know there are ladder stands and other locations all over the property that may have provided a better opportunity for him to take a deer, but I had asked if it was at all possible that I could hunt with him,” he stated. “We sat together and talked about life and high school and work and it was a really good time for us to get to spend together. We enjoyed every minute of those three-plus days. Great place, great people; deer or no deer, it really didn’t matter in the end.”

But here’s something that does…

As I write this, Ronnie Gay is on a CSX train headed to a point near Pikeville, Ky., to begin a long run that ends in Kingsport, Tenn.

“We have four boxcar loads of Christmas presents for people in communities along those CSX routes. It’s called the Santa Train because we’ll make 14 stops and hand out about 15,000 pounds of toys. It’s a poor area to begin with, but devastated now; a lot of people in that coal country don’t get a lot of presents. Hurricane Helene hit them hard and also washed about 90 miles of our tracks into the rivers. We’re going to have to take a different and longer route, but we’re going to get there. We’ll be handing out presents from Nov. 17-23. We’ll run that whole route. And at every stop we’ll be giving out gifts.”

Merry Christmas.