Sports Leader

“This thing would have never turned
out the way it did if it wasn’t for all
the guys that helped.”
Corey Elgersma REAL ESTATE AGENT
Hunters come up
with clever cover
A
group of N’West Iowa deer hunters
have been thinking inside the box
this fall.
Corey Elgersma of Sheldon
had been brainstorming the idea for
a unique deer blind for about four years. His idea
was to construct a blind on a grain wagon.
“There’s guys that build on running gears, but
they aren’t elevated,” he said. “There’s guys with
tower blinds, but I wanted to be able to move
around.”
As a real estate agent for Iowa State Bank Services
in Sheldon, Elgersma spends plenty of time traversing
area blacktops. He began keeping his eyes
open for a friendly farmer willing to part with a
wagon.
“These wagons hold their value pretty well,” he
said. “It took awhile to find one in my price range,
or in my wife’s price range.”
At the end of his search he found a 250-bushel
Dakon gravity-flow grain wagon.
Now it was time to start building. Luckily for
Elgersma, he can get by with a little help from his
friends.
Elgersma’s longtime friend Gary Barwick of Sheldon
was one of the first to lend a hand. Barwick
was a carpenter for many years before working for
Pella in Sioux Center.
“I kind of had the idea to put it on a hay rack, but
Corey took it to the next level,” Barwick said.
They began working on the wagon in September.
Initially, the idea was to have the floor of the blind
level with the top of the wagon.
DECEMBER 2017 | THE SPORTS LEADER 21