After two decades of hunting together, they shot bucks on the same day that each weighed more than 200 pounds.
Not only that, but the deer were shot within a couple of hours of each other and an eighth of a mile apart.
It’s unusual for one person in a family to get a big buck during the firearms season, let alone two people who hunt together.
Mike Sebastiao, 52, and Tia Sebastiao, 27, both of East Machias, were hunting from their separate ground blinds in Whitneyville on Nov. 4 after Mike dropped his daughter off and kept going to his own blind located in a ridge gully.
Mike did some bleating, imitating a doe, at daybreak and saw antlers through the trees shortly before 9 a.m. The buck decided to run across the opening.
One shot from Mike’s 30-06 dropped the buck at 250 yards. He got a text from his daughter shortly after, asking if he had hit it. He returned to the Coyote Den — their hunting camp — with his buck.
Two hours later, he got another text from Tia telling him to be quick to come back. She had gotten one too.
Once Mike dropped Tia off in the early morning, she started walking to her ground blind, taking pictures of the sunrise and looking around in the logging area for deer, she said. She jumped a deer, just seeing its tail as it ran away, but sat in her blind anyway and waited.
Tia started some bleating to attract the bucks and heard her father shoot. A little while later, she looked up from the bleat can and saw antlers glistening in the sun at approximately 11 a.m.
“I was shaking so bad,” she said.
She shot the buck from 150 yards away and he dropped. She texted her father to come help her. She started to gut her deer, but her dad took over after she poked the paunch and couldn’t continue herself, she said.
Tia’s 8-point buck weighed 205.6 pounds, while her father’s 10-point buck just squeezed in as a Big Buck at 200.1 pounds.
It is Tia’s first time in the Big Buck Club, and Mike’s fourth.
This was the third year the pair hunted on the property, where they scouted and had game cameras to track the animal activity there, Mike said. They have plans to hunt there for a fourth year.
“Being in the Big Buck Club at the same time with my daughter and having sequential tag numbers on our deer made this hunt special,” Mike said.
The father and daughter have also trapped together for coyotes and bears since Tia was 10, he said. She got her first gun, a .243 rifle, at that age too, he said.
They plan to do European mounts of the two buck skulls and racks, by boiling, scraping and using peroxide on the heads to remove any residual meat. Tia wants to mount the bared skulls together on a wall to commemorate the special father-daughter hunt.
“I’ve been hunting with my dad since I can remember, before I could even shoot a gun. Actually harvesting something the same day — I’m just speechless. These are memories I will hold onto and remember forever. I can only hope my sons will look up to me and think of me and our special moments the same way. (That day) was amazing and just brings tears to my eyes,” she said.
The Big Buck Club wasn’t Tia’s only first this year. She also shot her first moose during the September week of bull hunting. It weighed 670 pounds and had seven-point antlers with a 36-inch spread, Mike said.
It landed in the puckerbrush when Tia shot it at 6:15 p.m. and it took them 700 feet of rope and five hours to get it back to camp, she said.
Hunting is a family tradition and Mike hopes his two grandsons, ages 4 and 6 months, will follow in their mother’s footsteps.
“They are in partial training already,” he said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
