Devils Lake trip 10/19 – 10/23

Apparently the bad luck fairy has been busy lately.

If it weren’t for bad luck….we wouldn’t have had any on our trip to Devils Lake.

Started before we even left home…..

Fri night 10/18 – Pretty much all loaded up couple things left to do new plugs for the outboard and grease the trailer bearings…..simple jobs one would think.

Trip to parts store for plugs….they don’t have them.

Home to grease the bearings..out of grease trip to the parts store.

New grease loaded…..grease gun apparently decided it was a good time to die or something. Reloaded and pumped the heck out of it a couple times nothing.

Back to the parts store for a new grease gun.

Get on the road Sat morning, get to Alexandria and stop to fuel up…notice the diamond plate on the front of the trailer is all pulled loose. Over to Fleetfarm for new screws get it screwed back down.

Get to Grandforks stop for leg stretch, most of the screws I just replaced are gone and now there is a tear in the aluminum diamond plate almost all the way around the screw that held.

Find a hardware store, get locktite and more screws get it put together.

Get just west of Grandforks and hit something in the road that kicked up and put a dent in the front of the trailer and bent the fender almost back to the tire. Pulled off right away and pulled the fender back out to ensure it wasn’t rubbing.

Finally get to a soggy/muddy Devils Lake we get checked in start scouting/hitting up the land owners we know out there for permission. They all have people hunting their land already which has NEVER happened to us.

Lots of crops still standing, well educated local birds and guys leaving early from the place we stayed cuz hunting was so bad.

We found a couple sloughs with good numbers of ducks in them but most were dismal by ND standards. The sloughs with ducks were about as decoy shy as I have ever seen ducks anywhere. We’d get in and set up hoping they would come back…some would but most wouldn’t and the ones that did avoided us like the plague even though we were set up exactly where they were sitting in the sloughs when we found them.

The first morning was windy and snowy so we had really high hopes but the ducks just didn’t cooperate which as we found out would be the theme for our whole trip.

More and more posted land out there every year so having our land owners already locked up by other hunters really put us behind the proverbial 8 ball.

We didn’t have much to show for all the miles and hours we put on but we had fun. I got a buff and a ringer that I think are destined for the wall…just got back late last night so I am starting to look in to taxidermy options.

Once again this year we missed it by about a week. As we were leaving yesterday the cornfields were starting to come down, the fields that were down were firming up and the forcast was dry for a few days. Probably should have been leaving this Sat or the next.

The guys hunting the main body of Devils lake seemed to be doing better than most and had more consistent shooting so if your heading out there with a big boat and main lake hunting in mind you should do okay.

Oh yeah…forgot to mention…the first morning in the heavy wind and snow…..motor with new plugs and fresh gas ran great on the way out and picking up the birds we got….wouldn’t start after picking up dekes to head in. Tried over and over. Finally gave up and rowed to the nearest shore and walked the boat back since there was no rowing against the wind. Got back to where we were staying to try and figure out why it wouldn’t start…..first stinkin pull it started right up.
Ran good the rest of the time…of course the winds were relatively light the rest of the trip so rowing wouldn’t have been an issue had it not started again.

I’m smiling picturing you walking through muck and gunk pulling the boat. Good times I’m sure.

Yeah when I got back to the truck after morning 1 I was ready to call it and just head home.

Good luck out there RR, I hope you fare better than we did. I just have a small boat so hunting the big water is out of the question for us, we wanted to focus on field hunting and just brought the boat as a back up plan but as I said LOTS of crops still standing and the fields that were down were muddy and I didn’t want to tear up a field or worse yet get stuck so it was good that we had the boat.

Here is what we saw in our travels….which is pretty sad because I can easily give you totals of some of the ducks we saw…..4 canvasbacks, 4 goldeneyes, 1 hen red head, a very light spattering of mallards nothing like normal, less than 15 pintails, a few(less than 20) widgeon and the big shocker for me is that I didn’t see a single bluebill in all our driving around.

There were still some bluewing teal around, seemed to be a lot of gadwalls, ringbills, shovelers and way more buffleheads and swans than I recall from previous years.

The snowgeese were starting to show up but the canadian count was WAY down from what we’ve seen in past years.

I really think the lack of corn being down out there is pushing the mallards and canadians that are moving down right on through but with the nice weather I just don’t think many have come down yet.