My 2013 deer plans begin!

[Dbax129]

Well, its like 1 am and no chance of sleeping for some reason.  So here to tell you my plans and seek advise if anybody has any.

I am heading to Vashon Island with the family and a buddy in the morning.  My goal is to look at thepublic land that iI heard is available, and to go knock on doors of some land owners that have 10+ acres. By some I mean as many as possible. I will be taking note of every place I go and will hand out my business card in case they want to contact me for any reason. I will get any names and #s of yes folks so I can call before I hunt.
I have several friends who want to start hunting this year, so I am hoping to find enough places that we could pair up and have a few different spots.
I will be keeping an eye out for any fences that need mending or any trees that need trimming, or any other quick handy work I could do for a potential yes bribe. :-)
What do you think? Complete waste of time on Vashon? There has to be a few conservative or otherwise hunter friendly folks right!

[Skyvalhunter]

Worth a try I don't know much about how the people on Vashon react to hunting. I know some on San Juan island are real attached to their pet deer.

[MooseStock]

I work for King county and we do a lot of road work on Vashon. We meet a lot of landowners coming out and talking to our crew to check out what were doing close to their property. Some of the larger landowners have expressed distress when talking about the deer as our crew has lots of guys that hunt on it and invariably the talk goes to deer since they are everywhere over there. Most people over there that have any kind of a garden have a high fence around it to suppress the deer. Some of those owners have encouraged some of our guys who bow hunt to get in touch with them so you may have a good chance when you knock on the right doors. I think you will only get two type of reactions....REALLY good or REALLY bad with not much in between as there definitely are lots of "nature lovers" over there also. Vashon is definitely a different place and when that person answers the door you will probably know what the answer will be before you ask. I always feel like I go back in time about 30 years when I go over there. One thing for sure...there are a ton of deer there and they are everywhere on the island...I drive a dump truck and its amazing how many deer we see some days when they are really out and many of them are right in Vashon itself. I think its definitely worth a try with those bigger landowners though.....good luck..........................Les

[Dbax129]

Well we had a good time. Talked to about 8 land owners and got 1 definite yes, one probably, but it depend on a couple of things, and one maybe, from a gentleman who hunted land for a few years, but it changed owners this year.  All in all, nobody seemed to hate us, we just talked to several people who thought they didn't have enough land, or thought they didn't care if we hunted other deer, but they didn't want us to hunt their pets. 
We did see about 10 deer on Sunday. We drove around from 10:30 am to 2:30 pm. with a 45 minute break at the park for the kiddos.
We saw only one buck, a 2 point, with really really long tines, the rack must have stood 16" off his head! Which seemed really long to me for a 2 point.   We got within 10 yards of 3 or 4 really big does on foot. Not really being sneaky.
We also stopped by am estate sale for 20 minutes.  10 deer on only a couple of hours seems like a ton to me. Just driving around the island and looking for doors to knock on!
:-). We are going again in a couple of weeks of anybody has any advise on where to look for access. Thanks! And I will keep yall posted.