Picking Your Shots

I think I've already said that when I am duck hunting the drake is always on my side. Not that I hog my hunting partners' shots, but I have spent a good portion of my hunting with beginners. I love teaching youngsters and new hunters. When you have a new hunter with you and you get a chance at a nice drake, sometimes you have to claim it for yourself and let the newby try to get any duck that they can. Sometimes it is an old timer who maybe isn't quite the shot they used to be. I remember an occasion when I had to sort of take charge when I was hunting with my Dad.

I was on vacation and had no one else to hunt with except my Dad. Not that I didn't enjoy hunting with Dad, but he was getting old and couldn't really do much except barely climb in and out of the boat or the blind. Whatever, I was still fine with hunting with him. We caught some really bad luck on the weather. Had a full gale blowing for about 3-4 straight days. Really limited where we could hunt. Too rough to hunt the Pamlico Sound where we were doing most of our hunting those days. Dad couldn't wade in a marsh. So we were searching for someplace where we could get out of the wind and just hunt from the boat.

We decided to try the White Oak River one day. We hunted about halfway between Haywood Landing and Stella. Set up in the widest place in the river, right in the middle of a big bend. Pulled the boat up against the shore and put up a little boat blind that I had made. We saw a few Wood Ducks right at daylight and killed a couple. But didn't see anything then for a couple hours. Had a single Bluebill drake come by pretty far out and managed to cripple it. Took a half an hour to find it, but we eventually did. Dad wasn't shooting too good so far. We saw some Coot swim up in a little branch that ran off the river and Dad said he'd like to try to get them because he hadn't had any Coot gizzards in a while. I eased the boat up to where they had gone in and spied them on the water. Dad got in position as best he could and fired away. Never touched a feather. I killed a triple when they took off. I'm not bragging about that, just giving an account of the hunt :-)

Dad was a bit downcast at his poor shooting, but we kept hunting. A while later 3 Wigeon came up the river and right to the decoys. Dad was on the right and he shot the right hand bird. I shot the one in the middle then swung on the left hand bird and killed it. We were happy to have the 3 nice ducks down and sent Hoss to gather them up for us. Dad asked me what I was doing shooting the middle bird first? I told him that by doing that I was assured of getting a double because the last bird would be on my end. He thought it over for a minute and said that was sort of like cheating. I thought it over for a second and said it was sort of like being smart.