This past Monday, way before sunup, Mickey Donahoo, Patrick Berg and I met at the Baptist Church and loaded everything into Patrick’s truck, then headed off for the Honey Hole, see my post of December 22, 2011, “[Covered Up]”. On our arrival there were 2 more hunters getting ready to walk in, but they told us they weren’t going in very far, so we decided to walk the extra half-mile to give them plenty of room. In the dark, we loaded everything on to Patrick’s cart (pulled by him of course) and headed on out.
Getting the decoys out, including our Mojo duck, setting up our ground blinds, we finished everything 20 minutes before legal shooting time and waited for the sun to come up. Ten minutes before shooting time, one bunch of teal swooped by, circled around, set their wings, looked over our spread, didn’t like something and headed off for a safer destination. This time we weren’t treated to a “duck explosion”, but had to settle for singles and doubles, creating a problem for yours truly!
Wanting to shoot 3-inch shells, I had left my twelve gauge, autoloader (2-3/4 shells only) at home and took my O/U, that turned out to be a big mistake for me! The O/U is a great gun for shooting clay birds or pigeons, see my post of March 6, 2008, “[The Pigeon Shoot]”. The gun handles well, points sweetly, but for shooting fast flying, teal, it’s a little barrel heavy and unlike spring, summer and fall shooting sports, when you’re bundled up for the cold, it doesn’t shoulder very good!
For the first 2 teal, I was “a day late and a dollar short”, with Mickey and Patrick knocking down both birds. Mumbling under my breath, I hadn’t yet figured out the problem, all I could do was cover back up and wait for the next ones. The next teal was a crossing shot that Mickey downed before I could even get the gun pointed, then the wind changed from our backs, the north, to the west, now blowing from our right to the left.
Being on the right of our set up, the birds were now decoying to my right in a spot between the edge of our spread and a dozen coots, confidence decoys that Patrick had put out to help draw in the ducks. As the first 2 teal plopped into the opening, my partners sprung to the attack, firing 2 shots and splashing both. This was nice, making our total 5 ducks, but their shots were fired over my head, not to my liking.
Sitting out the rest of the morning, I didn’t take any more shots, only dispatching a couple of cripples and like my daddy once said, “Boy, if you got limits each time out, they’d call it shooting instead of hunting.” Not a good day for me, a big fat zero on ducks, but Mickey and Patrick did limit out making our drive home bearable.
However, there is a sequel to this story. For Christmas Layla gave me a .17 HMR revolver, better said she surprised me, literally floored me, however there was a problem with the pistol. The pistol wouldn’t cycle properly and the spent shells wouldn’t eject. Taking it back to where she purchased it, they allowed me to swap them the malfunctioning pistol for a new, pump shotgun that will handle 3-1/2, 3 and 2-3/4 inch shells. We’re going back to the Honey Hole on Saturday and I’ll let everyone know how well (I hope) it works.