We arrived in Lily at 4am today (Friday) & quickly unpacked to get out for a short early morning hunt. It was around 30 degrees and the water was a little frozen. We broke enough to make a small hole and placed our decoys in it. We shut that down after 40 minutes of no activity to have ample time to scout. We accomplished most of what we needed to for duck scouting & noticed that there was snow, clouds, & wind in the forecast for the late afternoon. Instead of heading back to the house to rest, regroup, and get ready for tomorrow, Dan & I went out for a low maintenance hunt (only 2 decoys) near Teresa's house (that we hunted last year). We had ducks on top of us for most of the hour + we hunted & had a great time. We totaled 8 ducks (6 Gadwall & 2 Shoveler) and Jax did a great job of battling ice, multiple mark retrieves, a couple blinds, and multiple cripples. We lost 2 of the birds to the ice - Jax chased 1 until it dove and went under the ice shelf, never to return & another that lay atop the ice, but was in a place neither Jax nor I could safely get it. A hawk here will have a nice meal tonight... We stopped hunting with 45 minutes until sunset to be able to get our work done and get a reasonable night of sleep.
We dried out our gear (it was snowing pretty hard - as you can see from the photo below), Dan fixed the wiring on the truck (so we hopefully won't have a dead battery in the am), and we got everything set for tomorrow mornings' duck hunting. Now, it's off to bed - since none of us has slept in over 40 hours!
Glad you had a good first day. I hope you all get some rest! Jackson looks like his dad in the first picture and in the 2nd he is being his quirky self! Good luck tomorrow and have fun! Stay warm!
ReplyDeleteNice photos! Sounds like a good start . . . get some rest and have fun!
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