I totally agree with you. I would love to find 200-250 acres to lease myself. That would be ideal.

I got so fed up with trying to run clubs. The last one I ran, I had to threaten one idiot with being kicked out because if he wanted to hunt a field and someone was pegged out on it, he would just strap a climber on and walk through the woods, get to where he could see it, and hunt it when a members wife was in the shooting house. I had one guy get butthurt and quit and took 3 members (his sons) with him because he would put a big plug of Red Man in his face in the morning and spit all in the shooting house floors. I had carpet in all of our shooting houses and it had turned black with all the spit on it. The women in the club were getting grossed out by this and complained. I asked the guy nicely and he acted like I had slapped his wife or something, so the second time I "asked" it was not so nicely. Had to replace all the carpets in 15 shooting houses in the off season that year. I had another guy shoot a buttonhead in a cutover with me watching him through the binocs from another stand (we were 4 point on one side or 15 inches wide landowner rule) and then just lied to my face and said it was a coyote when I asked him what he shot. I had one who followed me everywhere I went. I put a climber up in a hardwood bottom that was difficult to get to and the next weekend I went in there and my stalker had put a double ladder two feet from my climber. Incessant complaining of the rules that they voted on. I had one member get out the first year because I made him pay a guest fee when he brought his scumbag son down there, and I didn't make another guy pay a guest fee the next weekend because he brought his relative down who was active military and on leave from defending this country in Iraq. (It stated in our rules that active military would not pay a guest fee). I can't remember but I think it was Marcus1 from this forum that was the guy who brought him if I'm not mistaken. I had one guy who would lay up in the bed all day and then go out at 4 pm and then whine to me that he wasn't killing any deer. I didn't allow any drinking at the club whatsoever and if you took one sip you was not coming through the gate. If I found out about it I was coming and getting you out of the woods. We had a little camping spot leased a couple of miles away and you could feel free to pop a top there at the end of the day. Had a couple of members complain that they should be allowed to drink and that they were grown. My response: Go find you another hunting club. I had a pet peeve from a couple of previous clubs where members would come in from hunting in the mornings, lay around for an hour and then hop on their 4 wheelers or trucks and go scouting or to "move a stand". I told them 4 wheeler traffic would be limited to 1. Going to your stand, and 2. Going to pick up an animal you had shot. If you weren't on that 4 wheeler for any of those two reasons, you needed to stay the hell off of the roads and quit riding field to field "scouting". I enforced that rule hard. If you gotta move a stand do it when you go in to hunt. Had two guys get in a fight one time because they guy would bring his dog to the club on weekend and put it on one of those cable systems that goes from tree to tree like a clothesline. The dog got off of the cable one night and stole a sausage off of the grill (I say that loosely because it was 3 cinder blocks with a grate on top of it) that the dude was cooking. Then the next couple of days the guy that got the sausage stolen would just go over and let the dog off of the cable so it would run off, while the owner was hunting. I mean it was like a bunch of grown men acting like children. If you really want to get a lesson in human behavior and personality differences, you need to sign up to run a hunting club.

All of this happened over a 2.5 year period. We had a nice setup, rules were not intrusive and were voted on by the membership. Didn't stop the complaining though.


Man I just got tired of all that mess.