Captain Mike Taylor runs deep sea fishing charters out of Morehead City, North Carolina. When he’s not guiding for billfish—Taylor captained a crew that won the prestigious White Marlin Open in 2018—he spends much of his time bow hunting for big whitetails near his childhood home in southern Indiana. Earlier this month, he arrowed the biggest buck of his life on a Decatur County lease he’s hunted for 15 years. With 19 scorable points, the buck’s green score came in just north of 220 inches, Taylor tells Field & Stream.
Decatur County gained national notoriety in 2021 when Dustin Huff shot a 211-inch typical from 40 yards away with a crossbow. That deer went on to become the second largest typical in the Boone & Crockett record books. Taylor says he shot his deer roughly six miles from the 185-acre hog farm where the Huff Buck was killed.
“He showed up three years ago,” Taylor said. “I didn’t have many cameras out that year because they were logging the property, but I managed to get a picture of him on the last day of the season.” According to Taylor, the buck’s rack scored roughly 170 inches that first year then ballooned to more than 200 inches the year after.
Both Taylor and his neighbor got trail cam photos of the deer during the fall of 2023, and Taylor had multiple in-person encounters. “I had him at 90 and 60 yards last year during gun season, but I passed,” he said. “I’m a bow hunter, and I wanted to take this deer with my bow.”
The deer survived the 2023-24 season despite being shot twice by neighboring hunters. “This deer was hunted by me and my neighbor, 4 crossbow hunters, 10 rifle hunters, and at least six late season muzzle loader hunters,” Taylor said. “Luckily, there’s a property nearby that doesn’t allow any hunting, and he was able to hide out there a good bit.”
The buck showed up again on one of Taylor’s cameras in July of this year. “I spent a lot of time working on different land improvement projects this year to try to keep him around,” he said. “I think that made a big difference.”
He put in new food plots and dug a watering hole on the property, and by early November, the giant buck was showing up at the watering hole on a regular basis. “On November 2, I walked up on him at the watering hole, and he busted me,” he recalls. “I figured I blew my chance after that, but he kept coming back—especially when the rut kicked in. He wouldn’t get too far from that watering hole when he was chasing does.”
On the afternoon of November 11, Taylor decided to hunt a new stand on the edge of a soybean field where a finger of woods jutted out into the field, taking advantage of a favorable northwest wind. “At about 5 o’clock, I saw four bucks chasing a doe across the open field about 1,000 yards in the opposite direction,” he said. “One of them looked like a 300-pound deer. I figured it must have been him, which meant there was no way he was coming back toward me anytime soon.”
Taylor considerd climbing out for the evening and began strategizing for the next morning’s hunt. “After about 10 minutes of that, I decided to just stick it out until dark. At 5:30, I heard footsteps coming down the field edge,” he said. “I looked down, and it was the buck by himself. I couldn’t believe it was him. It was like seeing a ghost.”
At thirty yards, the buck stopped to watch two squirrels fighting in a nearby tree, Taylor said. “He watched them for a few seconds, and I drew back on him while he was looking off into the woods,” he said. “He kept walking toward me until he was 20 yards broadside. I put the pin on him and told myself to follow through. I could tell by the sound of the arrow that it was a good double-lung hit.”
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Taylor’s arrow passed through completely and stuck into the ground. The deer wheeled around and took off toward the finger of woods up ahead of his stand. He didn’t make it more than 100 yards, Taylor said, before crashing into the field. “He was dead in ten seconds, and he died running,” said Taylor. “The first thing I saw when I walked up on him were those split G2’s—and then a wall of tines. I never dreamed I’d kill a deer like that, let alone in my home town.”
