Bird of a life time.

Right now we are drying our gear and getting for our second day of Chesapeake Bay sea duck hunting. Today wasn’t so good. We got 1 surf scooter and downed an old sqwall but couldn’t retrieve it successfully.

As I have said many, many times I have too many hobbies. I guess that is better than just watching TV. But with the cold weather forecasted I set aside a long weekend to hunt with my dad down in North Alabama and SE Tennessee. We have hunted Lake Guntersville in Scottsboro, AL for about 3 years now and while you might see a thousand birds we have yet to bring home enough birds to make it worth it. The water gets pounded by hunters and the ducks get super wary. So getting birds to decoy is near impossible. We hunted Friday afternoon and all day Saturday and didn’t take a single bird. We got up and headed to Nickajack Sunday morning. Nickajack is the lake just above Guntersville, but is in Tennessee just outside Chattanooga. We were the only hunters and saw lots of birds working closely to the decoys. Had I brought some mallard decoys I think we could have limited out on mallards. But in the end we got a banded canada goose, a lesser scaup, a greater scaup, and a drake mallard. I think we will hunt more of Nickajack and less of Guntersville.

We have been looking for this guy for a couple years.

My dad and I got up at 3am and traveled down to Nickajack Lake to hunt some diver ducks on Sunday. The air temperature was in the upper 20s, but with the windchill it was cold. Isabella got pretty cold and was too excited about retrieving all the ducks we were dropping. The day seemed like every other bad day of duck hunting we have done before but something was different. We got one at daylight and then moved early morning to find the ducks. Once we found them we moved in and let them come back to us. Slowy the dropped in all day. We ended up ten, two shy of a full limit. Eight ringnecks and two mallards.

My Dad is in Wyoming hunting right now. Its 85 here, it doesn’t look that warm there…

Success. After missing a moose on his hunt in Canada a couple of weeks ago, dad took this small mule deer buck to get some meat in the freezer. He can now pack up and get on to South Dakota to hunt pheasants. Man I wish I was going.

This past weekend I had the fortune to head out Reelfoot Lake to duck hunt with Bob Davies. I met Bob through biking. We found out that we like to duck hunt and luckily he asked if I wanted to join him for a hunt. Bob grew up in Union City, TN just east of Reelfoot Lake, the Tennessee mecca for duck hunters. My dad and I have have hunted ducks in East Tennessee for a coupe years with not many ducks to show for it. We started hunting Guntersville Lake down in north Alabama 2 years ago. Guntersville has done a lot of habitat development and as such there are a lot of ducks that winter there. On a typical trip we might see 5-10k ducks. Most are divers and raft up in the middle of the channel making them hard to decoy. We have a good time, but we always want more ducks. So we jumped at the opportunity to hunt real migrating ducks down the Mississippi River.

Turns out Bob is good friends with Chip Siegler whom I graduated high school with. Chip I didn’t run the same circles so our paths never real crossed, but it was good to get know him a little. Anyway, Chip, Bob and I headed to Union City around 10am on Friday. My dad was in Colbert, Al on business and drove up separate.

It was evident right away that Bob and his friends are my kind of guys. They like to goof off, drink, and hunt. I would say these guys would be my hunting equivalent to my biking crew.

Saturday morning we met up with Bob’s buddies at Darrin Parks pit blind just inside the Kentucky state line. In all there were 11 of us hunting a flooded soybean/milo field situated between the Mississippi River and Reelfoot Lake. Here are the numbers:

-25 ducks
-6 cases of beer
-3 bottles of vodka
-1 5th of jack

While 25 ducks between 11 guys doesn’t sound all that great, it really is better than you think. Most of these guys drank way more than they hunted and they really wanted to make sure my dad and I had a great experience. They always let us shoot first and they always said we killed the birds. Even though I know we didn’t.

Here are a few pics form the weekend. I can’t wait to go back, but I must thank all th guys for a great weekend of hunting and partying. Thanks Bob, Chip, Critchlows, Darrin, Rob, JB, Trip and his son, the Twins, JB’s brother, Murphy, Ben, Booger, and whoever else I forgot.

To finish up, I was super proud of Isabella. She doesn’t get to hunt much, so she is still pretty unsure of things. But she did great.

Check out this stonefly I saw close to the Nolichucky River in Erwin, TN

Took some time this morning to get in some fishing with Curt. It was relaxing to get back on the river and get away from the training and work.