Picked up my friend @ 4:00 am Saturday morning. After being able to get about 3 hours of sleep we were off to some public land for a good day of shooting. Or so we thought. Starts out by me missing our turn and having to drive 4 miles further down the road before I could turn around. No big deal right? Well we get back to our exit only to get behind a truck heading the same direction.
Well we pull up literally 5 seconds behind the truck. We start talking to our fellow hunters. Sure enough the topic of who is heading where comes up. Wouldn’t you know it they want the same spot we want. Well they were there 1st so we don’t even argue the matter besides we have a back up spot. we take the 30 minute trek to our spot. Pick out spots that will cover us and we wait. Talk about enjoying nature. What a show! As we enjoy some coffee, and discuss our decoy plan we get a brilliant meteor show, and coyotes providing a little background music. Well the time comes to start tossing decoys and so we start. Along with that the misery of public land starts.
For the next hour flash light after flash light appears( 20 hunters in all ), and they all settle down in less than 200 square yards. One group of 8 just happens to set up on a hill directly behind us. In come the 1st flock. I do some light calling, and we get 1 to break off the pack. My buddy let’s a shot fly and we have our 1st duck of the day! Celebration for as as That happens tobe the 1st duck I ever called. ( I guess he waited a bit for me to take the shot but realized I was just watching as this duck came straight at us. ) After some waiting in comes the next flock. This is where everything just start going down hill. The birds are coming from the NW (our left) We have no real shot as they are in that questionable range. Normally no big deal. Let them go and they circle back around. SO we let them go and as soon as they are over our heads We hear an Army unload on these birds. And off they go not one bird was brought down. Then we get rained on. about 15 shells worth of BBB come down on us. So I make a hike back to let the Swell people know that we are over in the direction they are shooting and It would be appreciated if they turned around and looked at their decoys and shot at birds when they were in their range. YEAH They didn’t understand apparently because this repeated about 5 more times. During which everyone realized that it was a free for all and if you thought you had a shot you had to take it because if you waited for them to circle they were going to get shot at about 20 times, and should they not get hit they are not coming back.
To sum it up the other group who got there the same time we did 1 shot, and missed. My self 1 shot on a nice Mallard drake who had a bit of armor, because I shot he dropped about 5 feet and went back on his way! My buddy got off 2 more shots, guy next to us no shots. The hunter standing on the hill wearing blaze orange ( I’m not kidding) about 10 shots no duck. The army on the other side of the hill had to of let of a good 75 shots and ended WITH 1 HEN AND 1 GOOSE! To them I would like to say thanks for making everyones morning miserable!
Moral of the story?… This week I’m knocking on doors. Hunting with idiots Sucks!