Machs nichs to me. I don't bother hunting PA until end of first week or the second week anyway. Most of the PA guys I talked to were for it. They screwed up in not including Sundays in the new regulations, IMO.
One thing it will do for us in MD is yank the PA guys out of our woods that first Saturday, hopefully. Historically there's been a large crew of PA guys that swoop down to the Game Lands I hunt to score an extra day of hunting, and all the while blasting anything that moved and actually put on drives right through where others were hunting. (I mean, c'mon. Drives on opening day morning for pete's sake, on public not private land where it's acceptable?!)
I don't hunt on public land if I can help it, but I'm with you gnoahhh, this might keep all of those "Penntuckians" from comin down here a scarin all of our deer. Man, you drive past the parking areas for the public land on Saturday, and 3/4 of the vehicles are from PA. They can get here and be in the woods in about an hour or so. Them guys up there in Southern PA ain't goin to no deer camps because they know that they can come down here and shoot more in one day than they can in a whole season in PA.
I can see where this might upset the traditions of those guys that go to "Deer Camp" to hunt. But I bet the majority of the hunters in PA don't. I've talked to a handful of guys that I deal with from up around the Scranton area, and none of them go to a hunting camp. They all sleep in their beds at home, get up bright and early on opening day and drive down the road a few miles to where they hunt on private land and go wait for a buck to show himself. ALL of those guys are delighted with this news.
We've always had opening day on Saturday. I always thought that no hunting on Sunday gave the deer a "cool down day" so that we could catch them off guard on Monday. Now that we can hunt on Sunday, it hasn't made a hill of beans difference. We can still shoot the hell out of them for the next 2 weeks just like we used to.
If it's the tradition you guys are worried about, or the logistics of getting to where you need to be on a certain day, keep doing what you do. I'm sure you'll still kill just as many deer as you used to. For those of you that don't have any traditions of going somewhere special, go shoot a deer on Saturday and have fun doing it. All of the rest of those guys will be sitting around their deer camp getting drunk and waiting for Monday to roll around. If I was from there, I'd be having a celebration for the extra day of deer season. It's hard for me to comprehend people complaining about more hunting time, but I'm not from there.
