By David Draper

Last fall, I was lucky enough to finally fulfill my dream of hunting Sitka blacktail deer on Kodiak Island. The trip was pure Alaska: rough-water beach landings, white-knuckle bush plane rides, brown bear encounters, whale sightings, and mountain vistas so magnificent I won’t even try to describe them here.

And, of course, the food.

You might think it would be hard to eat well on boat with a galley the size of a closet, but with the help of Camp Chef’s Steve McGrath, we dined mighty fine. It didn’t hurt we had access to some incredibly fresh protein, including blacktail deer and tanner crab plucked from the Gulf of Alaska just hours earlier.

By David Draper

I spent the last week anchored off the southwest coast of Alaska’s Kodiak Island aboard the 50-foot Sundy. Our group of media and manufacturers was there to hunt the island’s blacktail deer and test out some great gear from Browning, Cabela’s, Camp Chef, Columbia, and Winchester. But Alaska, being the bountiful state it is, offers so much more and, as you can see from this photo of the treasure chest I brought home, we took full advantage.

On day one, we and our companion boat, the 43-foot Arctic Endeavor, dropped crab pots before steaming a couple hours south to a bay we were hoping would be full of blacktails. While everyone did see deer there, only I managed to connect with a buck before rising seas drove us to more protected waters. Over the course of the next several days, most of our group managed to tag at least one deer and we ended up with an equal mix of bucks and does, all of which got butchered on the Sundy’s back deck, processed, and packaged.