Sunday was the last day of the 2011 and 2012 waterfowl season in my part of Ohio. As has become the norm, the action just seems to get good at the very tail end of the season. This day was no different.
On Saturday I headed up to do some scouting at one of the farms we hunt, near Jeffersonville. We had recently had heavy rains so the whole area was flooded. It was also unusually loaded with ducks and geese (at noon).
Needless to say I was more than a little excited to get in there the following day. I called Dad up to give him the report and said "I don't know what you're doing tomorrow, but I know what I'm doing. Want to shoot some ducks?" Of course he said yes and we set our plan into motion.
Since the area was flooded, we couldn't drive in and unload our gear by car, like we normally do. So Dad dug out the "rickshaw" and sled - so we could transport our decoys and layout blinds across a field (and over a fence) to get to our spot.
When we pulled up and climbed out of the truck we immediately heard the low groans and high pitched clucks of hundreds of geese. As the sun made it's way up and we had a little light, we could see hundreds of birds roosting. Unfortunately we had no real way to sneak in and were pretty loud transporting all that gear. We kicked up the birds and it was something out of a show on the Outdoor Channel. Awesome.
In hindsight, I'd have changed our plan and just snuck in with a gun, a box of shells and maybe a couple of decoys to start the day, and then come back later with the full load of gear. If we'd have done that, I'm guessing we'd have limited on ducks pretty early. But we opted to haul in all the gear and it was a bit of a cluster. But we finally got settled and had pretty consistent action all day, except for a brief lull mid-day.
It was really windy, with gusts over 30mph. Ducks and geese had a hard time getting down and pitching in with that kind of wind. But, it kept them on the move all day.
We had a great time. We missed a lot. We limited on geese. We shot a few Mallards (4). It was a great day afield with Dad. I'm so thankful he introduced me to waterfowl hunting all those years ago, and that still do it together today. This was a hunt I'll not soon forget.
Check out the (bad) video I took from within the layout blind. This was after we had our limit of geese and they just kept piling in. If we had more hunters with us, we'd really have stacked them up.
Posted: 2/3/2012