Lightning strikes twice for Jordan at Honey Brake
When Tyler Jordan shot a huge buck on Dec. 7, 2020, he made a prediction that fortunately didn’t hold true.
“I may never shoot another 190-inch buck. I’m in the woods a lot and I have never seen a buck that size,” Jordan told me when I wrote the story for Louisiana Sportsman about his huge buck that scored 190 4/8 inches of mass. Because one of the buck’s hooves was infected by foot rot, leaving a stub in its place, the buck earned the name of “Stomper.”
Jordan was hunting in Catahoula Parish on the 20,000 acre Honey Brake property when he took the buck. Fast forward four years, when Jordan, now age 32, encountered a buck that has earned the name of Stomper Jr. because of similar genetics as Stomper.
The son of Bill Jordan, founder and CEO of Real Tree, the leading licensor of camouflage patterns in the world, Tyler Jordan works in the marketing department of the company. He lives in Columbus, Ga.
“We became interested in Honey Brake in 2018 and would bring business guests down to duck hunt,” he said. “We had no idea at first that the property was capable of producing quality deer, but as we learned what the folks at Honey Brake were doing our interest was piqued.”
Stomper Jr.
Putting out trail cameras this past September, plenty of quality bucks began showing up, but it was not until Nov. 1 that Stomper Jr. started showing up on cameras.
“He was showing up on camera at a couple of different spots and it was always at night,” Jordan said. “There was a big 8-point buck I was interested in taking with my bow and he was always showing up on our cameras in the same areas as the big one.
“We went to Academy and purchased a ground blind to set up on the food plot where we felt was the best chance to see the deer. One afternoon, two minutes after legal shooting hours had ended, Stomper Jr. showed up at 20 yards. A camera man and I were in the blind and apparently the buck saw the camera light and he spooked and took off. We didn’t see any more evidence of him for 2 ½ weeks.”
A couple of days prior to Thanksgiving, the buck was showing up fairly consistently on a different field half a mile away.
It became an issue of looking for favorable weather when deer were more likely to be active.
“On Dec. 2, I checked the weather forecast and it looked like things would be pretty decent, and I felt that if deer would move at all, it might be then,” he said. “We had the north wind we needed and on the morning of Dec. 3 he showed up four minutes before legal shooting time.”
Eighty-five year record falls
Setting up a ground blind in the area where this photo was taken, Jordan got in the blind around 2:30 p.m. the afternoon of Dec. 5.
“There was plenty of action as does and smaller bucks were displaying rutting activity, and then at 5:10 I looked up and there stood Stomper Jr.,” Jordan said. “I shoot a Franchi .308 and got on him. When I hit the trigger, he dropped on the spot.”
The rack the 250-pound buck carried was mind boggling. There were 14 points, evenly distributed on each side, and the inside spread was 19 5/8 inches. Main beams were 26 ½ inches each with bases measuring 5 2/8 and 5 1/8. The buck was determined to be 6 ½ years old.
The tale of the tape measured a gross score of 203 inches with the net score being 192 3/8 inches.
The current Louisiana state record for typical whitetail bucks is a record that has held since 1939, when Marshall McKay downed a massive buck in Madison Parish that measured 186 6/8 inches. After a drying time of 60 days, it is very likely that Tyler Jordan can lay claim to a new Louisiana state record for typical bucks.
Well Tyler, you won’t ever be able to say what you told me in 2020, that you may never shoot another 190-inch deer. You just did.
