Taking to the woods in Florida with a bow offers some problems not common to other areas of the country. Photo by William J. Bohica.

As any football fan will tell you, it’s a long, long, time between the Super Bowl and the first pre-season game of the next NFL season. And for those afflicted with a case of football fever, the possibility of severe withdrawal symptoms is real!

Serious hunters can emphasize with them. Once spring turkey season closes, they too have an interminable wait before they can get back into the woods. That’s one reason why the opening of archery season for deer ranks high on many hunters’ lists.

Not only does it signal the start of another hunting cycle, but it’s also a great time to get out early, before the deer feel the full pressure of the hunting season. The bucks are more relaxed in their movements, and hunters have an excellent opportunity to harvest a quality buck, even on public lands. In fact, the top non-typical Florida buck was harvested by bow hunter James Stovall on the Green Swamp West WMA in 1999, and scored a massive 207 5/8 Pope and Young points!

That’s more than enough “horns” to make any hunter’s heart skip a few beats. But even if a monster buck doesn’t appear, hunters on private lands and some state wildlife management areas can also take antlerless deer -- an excellent opportunity to put some quality meat in the freezer. In addition, given the up-close-and-personal nature of bow hunting, it becomes an outstanding way to do some in-depth scouting for the following muzzleloader and general gun seasons.

There are a lot of advantages to getting in the woods during archery season. There are also a few drawbacks. You can’t “get in the woods” without being outdoors, and bow hunters get the “full” outdoors treatment.

In the Northwest Zone, the archery season begins October 14, which is actually a very pleasant time of the year. The zones to the south present more daunting weather.

The South Zone opens September 9, while the Central 0 starts on September 23. Those are tough times to hunt. Summer’s heat is still in full swing, and with the rainy season well underway, you can add standing water and high humidity to the forecast. That creates a number of challenges, and one of the most annoying is biting insects. Picking off ticks, painting chigger bites, and scratching every place a mosquito visited isn’t a great way to end the day. Fortunately, this situation is preventable.

You can easily thwart ground crawlers like ticks and chiggers by spraying your boots and pants cuffs with a quality repellent spray. A thorough dousing also keeps most mosquitoes and no-see-ums from biting, but it doesn’t do much to prevent the annoying little devils from buzzing around your ears, hovering in your face, or crawling around your eyelids. A better bet is a ThermaCELL.

This is a compact, relatively inexpensive unit that uses a small butane cartridge to heat and disperse scent from a small repellent mat containing allethrin -- a chemical copy of a naturally occurring insecticide found in certain flowers. Once the unit is turned on, it takes just a few minutes to disperse the scent and provide a mosquito-free zone for about 15 feet around the unit. If you’re sitting inside that zone, you can wear shorts and a T-shirt!