I would like to take a few minutes to offer a sincere and heartfelt thank you to the residents of Vashon and Maury Island. I belong to a very small group of blacktail deer hunters who have been treated so well by residents that words alone are insufficient to express our gratitude for you hosting us each year.

We make a half dozen scouting trips to the island each summer and on many of those trips bring along our wives and kids, who enjoy spending the day in town shopping, and then we visit one of your wonderful eating establishments before heading home.

I bring my family’s travel trailer over before the season and leave it through sometime around Thanksgiving, and our group will also plan family outings during times that the hunting season is not open.

We hunt public land as well as private land, but primarily focus on the private lands available to us.

We hunt modern firearms season, but use both shotguns in more open areas and archery tackle where it is more congested.

We have moved increasingly toward hunting from tree stands because doing so has increased our success rate, but as an unintended consequence, this also makes it so that we have less of a concern with where our shot will end up if we miss the deer we are shooting at because we are shooting down at a steep angle toward the ground.

The fact that Island Center Forest is open for hunters who have not developed long-term relationships with island residents is something that I applaud. It allows access, and it is a great place to hunt blacktails. We have taken deer there and probably will in the future, but more than that, when hunting there, we meet others who are new to hunting Vashon and have a chance to offer them advice and encouragement.

In closing I would like to once again try to convey in words the gratitude we feel toward the residents for hosting us each year.

— John Hasty