Luck doesn't just happen -- not always, anyway. That's why so many people have heard the statement defining luck as "when preparation meets opportunity."

Casey Shoopman (left) and Chuck Sykes got these two bucks on the same day and just 45 minutes apart on property they had never hunted. Now that's bowhunting success! Photo courtesy of Chuck Sykes.

This story takes that concept a step further, to a place where preparation actually enables opportunity -- bowhunting opportunity -- in the places you enjoy hunting. Heck, this story can even help you make bowhunting luck in areas that are completely new to you.

Chuck Sykes showed me how that's done. Sykes, who's spent decades in deer woods across the whitetail's range, participated a few years ago in a short deer hunt I was part of. He and his hunting partner, Casey Shoopman, arrived on the property just a couple of hours before an afternoon/evening hunt.

More than a dozen other bow­hunters were on that trip, so the landowner had subdivided his property and randomly assigned hunting areas. Sykes and Shoopman, the videographer for Sykes' "The Management Advantage" TV series, picked up a map that showed about 100 acres they'd have access to over the next three days.

"Human nature affects all of us, even when we're planning our hunts," Sykes said. "When Casey and I looked at the map, we immediately noticed two good-sized food plots. We knew it was a pretty safe bet that most of the hunters who'd been on this property before we arrived had placed stands overlooking -- or very near -- one of those two food plots.

"We were using primitive weapons, and I felt that the deer had patterned all the hunters who'd been on stand near those food plots," he explained. "We were confident that the deer would be coming into those food plots late, and that would definitely limit our shooting opportunities."

Sykes and Shoopman noticed some good stands of cover between the two feeding areas -- and eliminated the rest of the land they had access to.

"We believed that the deer would stage in that area -- where we suspected there hadn't been any hunting pressure at all -- and move into one of the plots close to dark," Sykes explained. "So we walked into that area to 'ground truth' it -- that is, to confirm what we believed to be the movement pattern in that part of the property by just looking at the map."

Starting near one of the major feeding areas, the pair backtracked into the timber until they found a small area where a number of game trails intersected.

"When we found where all the trails were meeting up," Sykes said, "we'd found our hunting area."

Having volunteered to help carry portable stands and climbing sticks, I was amazed at how quickly these two "knew" where they would hunt. Focusing on the stand location, they made that decision just as quickly.

"I'd listened to the weather radio and knew what the prevailing winds would be like while we were there," Sykes said. "Once we had the area located, we just looked for the stand location that would enable us to use the wind to our advantage morning and evening, while also providing us good shooting lanes."