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Toby Kimble estimates that he hunted 500 hours this season in his home state of Louisiana. All that effort paid off for Kimble this month, when he shot a 182-inch 14-pointer.

Kimble, from Krotz Springs, hunts the Atchafalaya Basin. He has access to private land and plants food plots and uses trail cameras extensively. Last summer he got pictures of a giant buck with a rack that dwarfed its body (below). Kimble set his sights on taking this buck.

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Because he owns his own business, a cafe/gas station, he has the flexibility to take off time to hunt. From Thanksgiving through January, Kimble hunts hard, often spending all day in his box stands. “I let the management do their jobs; it’s time for me to be with nature,” Kimble says.

Despite the long hours, the hunter did not actually see the buck live until a few weeks before he killed it. While using a grunt call, Kimble looked out his box stand to see the buck 20 feet away looking at him. The buck bolted, but Kimble gained valuable information about where the buck was bedded.

Closely monitoring the trail camera pictures, Kimble lost track of the buck for ten days. “Those kind of bucks don’t run does,” Kimble believes. “The does come to them.” Then he got a trail camera photo of the buck with some does. “I knew where he was then.”

On January 9, Kimble was in a stand overlooking a food plot when he saw two does and a spotted fawn feeding. It was 1:30 in the afternoon when his buck finally showed. Using a .30-378 Weatherby, he immediately put the crosshairs on the monster buck 200 yards away and pulled the trigger. With a little help from his friends, Kimble found his buck about 400 yards away.

The buck weighed 206 pounds on the hoof. The massive rack has been green-scored at 182 inches, which is gigantic anywhere, but especially for this part of the country.

Kimble definitely put his time in and worked hard for this buck. The intense dedication, long hours in the stand, attention to trail cameras–and a little help from the does–finally put a massive trophy buck in the sights of the well deserving hunter.

Top photograph by Jacob Thompson, courtesy of BayouBucks.com
Trail cam photograph courtesy of Toby Kimble