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.