For Jarrett Lance Rimel, a long-time hunter from Weirsdale, Dec. 26, 2007, dawned far too early.

Having spent Christmas Day in North Carolina with family members, he had driven almost all night to get home in time to hunt on that Wednesday morning.

“I was anxious to get home,” he recalled, “so got in at about 3 a.m.”

A member of the Smokey Hunt Club in Volusia County, Rimel and some of his buddies started out that morning in an area of the club’s property where they don’t usually hunt.

“After hunting for a couple of hours -- unsuccessfully -- we moved to another area,” he recalled.

“We had been dog-hunting the entire time. We had run several deer, but most of them were does.”

Next, the party moved over to another block of property and started again. Their quarry was a specific buck, one that had recently been captured on game cameras set up at a number of places in the woods.

“We knew he was in the area, and we were trying to locate him,” Rimel explained. “He was very nocturnal. No one sitting on a stand would ever see him, or at any time except on a camera at night. That’s why we went after him with the dogs.”

After everyone was in position, the hunters released the hounds -- which immediately jumped two large-racked bucks that had bedded down close together.

“The two deer split and went in two different directions,” Rimel said. “I was on the ground in the woods. One of them ran by me about 100 yards away. But I couldn’t see the deer, I could just hear him running.”

Using his handheld radio, Rimel let the other hunters in his party know that the deer was headed for one of the roads on the property.

“He got to the road,” Rimel said, “but he didn’t cross it. Instead, he turned back and ran a couple of hundred yards, and then turned right back toward where he came from.

“This time, he came within about 50 yards of me, and I could see him. I emptied my shotgun on him, and he disappeared.

“I didn’t know if he was down, or if he was still running. I waited for the dogs to come through, and they stopped right where I had shot.”

The president of the hunt club was the first to walk to where the deer was lying. When he called Rimel to see it, the hunter couldn’t believe what he had shot.

“The deer was a 9-point, but he scored 129 1/8 when we scored him,” Rimel noted. “That’s a lot for any Florida deer. He’s a shooter in any state.”

Biologists estimated he was 5 1/2 years old. The buck weighed 160 pounds, and garnered quite a bit of attention in the central Florida area.

“I won first place in the Safari Club International Big Buck Contest for Florida,” Rimel offered. “Actually, there were bigger deer shot in Florida last season. But mine was the biggest one entered in the contest.”

He added that his buck is the biggest deer killed on the Smokey Hunt Club lease in the 35 years that the club has been in existence.

“My father hunted that lease for most of his life, and I’ve hunted it all my life,” he said. “It’s the biggest deer we’ve ever seen on it.”

At one time, the Smokey Hunt Club comprised nearly 30,000 acres. But as development has encroached on the area’s traditional hunting lands, the size of the lease has shrunk to about 13,000 acres.

“In our opinion, the reason we had that deer in our club was because of the development,” Rimel suggested.