BETHEL — Despite rain and snow on the opening day of deer hunting for residents Saturday, several hunters got their deer in Western Maine. It was also a busy day for sales of sporting goods.

Tagging stations from Rumford to Bethel, West Paris and Sabattus were busy during the morning before heavier rain began to fall from an incoming winter storm.

At Jeremy Fredette and Sarah Lane’s Bethel Bait Tackle & More tagging station and sporting goods store, Bethel hunter Mike Piawlock brought in the largest deer at 12:15 p.m. It was the fifth buck of the day.

“All I saw of it were its antlers and its neck, and I shot it in the neck and it dropped,” Piawlock said of the 6-pointer he killed with his .300-caliber Winchester Short Magnum rifle.

When he saw the whole deer, he said, he was kicking himself because he thought it weighed about 180 pounds. He was hoping it was much larger.

Piawlock was in the Woodstock woods hunting from 7 to 9:10 a.m. and it was snowing at the time he shot the deer. His 6-year-old son, Kaine Piawlock, helped him drag it out of the woods to his all-terrain vehicle.

He and his son watched Fredette use a motorized cable attached to a large wood log frame to lift the buck out of Piawlock’s pickup truck bed and weigh it. “Oh, that’s a nice one: 203 pounds,” Fredette said.

“I love it when it’s bigger than I think,” Mike Piawlock said. “Guess I’ll have to put it up on my wall since it’s over 200.”

Last year, he shot a 204½-pound, 8-point buck to win second place and a free mount in Bethel Bait Tackle & More’s annual Big Buck Pool. His biggest was an 11-pointer weighing 214 pounds taken in 2011.

The first four bucks, the biggest of which weighed 128 pounds, were brought in between 8:21 a.m. and 10:10 a.m., Lane said.

Maine wildlife biologist Cory Stearns, a Rumford native of West Gardiner, took a tooth from each of the first four deer to determine their ages. He said they were all healthy 18-month-old deer.

Down at Kevin Billings’ store and tagging station, J&K Sporting Goods in West Paris, six bucks and two does were tagged by 12:30 p.m. The largest, a buck, weighed 152 pounds.

Employee Mark Neary said they got really busy tagging and weighing deer between 10:30 and 11 a.m.

“It seemed like everyone who was going to get a deer got one at the same time and brought them in all at once,” he said.

In Rumford at the Fire Department tagging station, firefighters Mike Arsenault, Lt. Keith Bickford and Deputy Chief Ben Byam had tagged five bucks and a doe by 4:05 p.m.

The last one was a 5-point, 133.8-pounder taken by John Blais of Rumford at 2:30 p.m. in the rain with a .30-06 rifle at 30 yards, Blais said.

The busiest tagging station of those contacted was Sabattus Deer Processing at 435 Middle Road in Sabattus. Hunters brought in more than 20 deer by 6 p.m. and there were still three hours to go. Since the station didn’t close until 9 p.m., owner Greg Provost said he was expecting even more deer.

“In the morning, we had so many deer, they were stacked up on top of each other like cordwood,” he said. “It looks like Gettysburg in here now, so it will be a long day and a long night for us.”

The biggest was a 201-pound buck that was killed in Lewiston.

“We had a lot of 4-pointers and spike horns today,” Provost said.

Pine’s Market, the Eustis tagging station that usually records many deer on opening day for residents, had seen only two by 5:40 p.m., clerk Kathy Gagne said.

“That’s awful, but I’m sure the weather had something to do with it,” she said. “It was snowing in the higher elevations and raining in the lower elevations, so it was a bust today for deer.”

The second deer, which was brought in at about 5:40 p.m., was a 5-point buck weighing an estimated 170 pounds, while the first was a 6-pointer weighing 193 pounds, Gagne said.

Tagging station owners said the sporting goods business was booming on Friday and Saturday in Bethel, West Paris and Eustis.

“It was like the Fourth of July here on Friday,” Lane said at Bethel Bait Tackle & More. “We sold five guns and a lot of ammo, and sold out of several things, like hunter-orange caps, which we had to order more of. They’ll be here Monday.”

Billings, owner of J&K Sporting Goods in West Paris, said they saw a lot of hunters who waited to the last minute to come in and buy gear. But they couldn’t buy guns on Saturday because the company site that does the background checks was down, employee Neary said. All he could do was take their information and tell them he’d call when it was available.

Gagne, at Pine’s Market in Eustis, said they sold a lot of buck lure, deer calls and blaze-orange garb.

“It’s been very busy,” she said.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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