Duckless Monday

With weather conditions of 60°, sunny, & no wind, it's not a surprise that we were skunked this morning. We hunted the same spot as Saturday morning but saw many fewer birds and had nothing come in range. With the writing clearly on the wall, we quit after one hour. Jackson was a very good boy, sitting quietly on his stand for that hour, but that's all I can really say because that is all that was asked of him. With the lack of bird action, I did have time to snap a couple decent pictures.

We were back at home base by 9 and spent the next two hours cleaning the mud off our gear and prepping for tomorrow's duck hunting. We also talked to Larry and learned that his customer leases the hunting rights for pheasants to others, so we will not be able to go there – except that we may be able to hunt ducks on that property. We are waiting to get word on that. 

We spent a fair amount of time looking at satellite imagery of some additional pheasant hunting spots and cross-referencing them with the hunting atlas that shows private land hunting availability; then made a plan for "scunting"all afternoon. This is a new word that Jennifer coined that is a combination of scouting and hunting.
When scunting, we find places that look promising then get out of the truck and hunt them for a short period of time to make a final determination. If they are good, we will come back and hunt it another day.

Sunday Pheasants

This afternoon we hunted pheasants from 3 to 5 at Boyer GPA just south of Chamberlain, along the Missouri River. As you can see, it is a beautiful area and very unlike anything in our neck of the woods. While Maggie is back at the house resting this afternoon, Winnie and Jax had the pheasant hunting duties. Unfortunately, we came up empty here too. This means we went the entire day without firing a shot... Winnie had several nice points that turned out to be hen birds and we also had multiple other hen flushes in our proximity, but no roosters. I did get some video of one of her points and will upload it later if possible.

It didn't help that it was 67° here and very dry, which caused both dogs and hunters to overheat quickly. We were giving them (the dogs) lots of water and were careful not to push them. This caused the early part of our hunting to be in short bursts with many stops and rest periods.

During the last part of the day, we crossed to the West side of the river to find the boat ramp we were planning to use for our pheasant hunting later in the week. Due to the drought conditions here, the Missouri River is very low and we will not be able to use the boat. This is disappointing on several fronts, as we were looking forward to hunting those 'across the river spots' that are off the beaten path and also because that means we have less available places to hunt for the rest of the week.

On a positive note, while talking to Larry (our host) at lunchtime, he suggested that we hunt a piece of private land South of Chamberlain that is owned by a former customer of his. He called to request permission for us and is waiting for a return phone call. We're keeping our fingers crossed!

Sunday Morning

This morning we hunted the WPA that we scouted yesterday that is about 15 miles north of Alexandria. We got a great show, getting to watch several hundred ducks fly all around us for the first 30 minutes of legal shooting time. With as many birds as were around us, we were not willing to take marginal crossing/passing shots, so we held our fire to wait for something to decoy in. Nothing did. We're not sure exactly why, but it could be attributed to the fact that our decoys were sitting in only 1 inch of water and there were clumps of mud from our walking around setting decoys sticking above the water everywhere, making the general area look unnatural. 

We did have a couple opportunities for easy shots when singles would land nearby or swim near enough to us, but again, we did not want to disturb 150 ducks in order to shoot one – so we didn't shoot.

After 30 minutes, we moved away from our decoys to a spot where we had seen many ducks land previously and that spot was also unproductive. We then moved another hundred yards down the shoreline with the same intent. That was again unproductive. In total, we hunted from 6:45–8:45 without firing a shot. That being said, we are not unhappy with the morning, as it was really fun being that close to so many ducks - hearing the air rip through their wings making it sound like fighter jets passing overhead is something you don't soon forget.

We've come to the realization & agreement that (like my golf game) the duck hunting this trip is going to be subpar. Because of that, we are going to concentrate mostly on pheasant hunting for the remainder of the trip. We will hunt ducks in spots close to our base of operations that have some chance of success (like yesterday), but will not spend much more time scouting for new areas.

Below are a couple more pictures of our sleeping accommodations. You can see that the dogs have each claimed a bed for themselves. The general set-up is that Winnie sleeps with Dan, Mag sleeps with me, and Jax sleeps in a bed by himself. Not what I would have predicted, but it seems to be working well...

Halloween Shopping, Scouting, & Pheasant Hunting

After lunch we made a quick trip to the Cabela's in Mitchell. We needed to exchange our new chest waders because both mine and Dan's were one size too small. I ended up keeping Dan's size 11's and he exchanged my 10's for a pair of size 12's. We also exchanged the new boat cover because it had developed a rip between West Virginia & here. Lastly, I returned a recently-purchased duck call for a different duck call because I didn't like the way the first one was operating this morning.

After our shopping was done, we found a medium size body of water at a GPA North-Northeast of Mitchell that was occupied by 100-200 ducks. We made a plan for what part of the water we will hunt and will go there tomorrow morning. The upside is that we are excited about hunting ducks tomorrow. The downside is that this spot is an hour drive from our base of operations.

We finished pheasant hunting at 6:30 with a total of two roosters. One for each of us. Winnie pointed two hens and Dan's rooster and Mag flushed the rooster I shot as well as another rooster that I missed, which was a very easy shot. Both dogs hunted very well. We started out this evening at a different spot that was a small WPA near the west side of Plankinton but found no birds there. We then returned to our spot from last night and produced the birds described above.

Better Morning Than Expected

We hunted this morning at White Lake GPA in White Lake, SD. It is a ~500 acre lake. We set up in some grass just out into the lake, off the bank. We shot 3 ducks this am (2 gadwall & 1 GW teal) and Dan missed an easy shot on another gadwall. We also had a duck in our decoys during legal shooting time, but it was before we were ready to shoot... Additionally, we were prevented from taking a couple very reasonable shots because we were situated with the sun in our eyes and didn't see the birds until it was too late...
After only seeing a few ducks yesterday, we were very pleasantly surprised to have as many birds nearby as we did. Jackson had the retrieving duties and recovered 2 of the 3 ducks we shot. The first 2 were a pair, with each of us dropping 1 duck. However, neither were dead and both were quickly too far away for effective follow-up shots on the water (though we did try before sending him). He was perfectly steady, but after the shots to drop the birds, then a total of 5-6 shots to try to anchor them on the water, he was just about going nuts (but he stayed steady on the retriever stand!). When I finally sent him, he went to the closest bird, which dove and then swam away without him seeing where it went. He was intent on finding that diving bird, to the point that he was repeatedly sticking his whole head underwater and pulling up vitiation from the bottom as he resurfaced. That's the first time I've ever seen 1 of my dogs go underwater after a bird. I walked out (the whole lake seemed to be 1' deep), and directed him to the bird, which by this time was 100 yards away from him. He took a good line to it after some fighting with me because he wasn't focusing (on me) to receive my commands. It dove again and he got it this time. After all this, we had no idea where bird #2 went. We tried to look for it at the end of the hunt, but did not find it. I think it swam out into the middle of the lake and was long gone...
Bird #3 was a single teal that was to be Dan's bird while I made sure Jax was good. After 3 misses, I had to step in and kill it with a single, well-placed shot at about 40 yards. Jax was steady and perfect and picked it up without fanfare.
I took some video, but the internet service here appears to be not robust enough to upload video or pics, so I may have to go back and add video when we get home, or another time when I have longer to fight with the internet...


We hunted from 7:50 (legal shooting time was 7:40) until 9:30, then picked-up to give ourselves as much time as we can to go scout NE of here for better duck hunting. We'll either hunt pheasants in that NE area this afternoon (if we see anything good), or head back to the spot from last night.


Overall, I knocked-down 2 ducks on 2 shots and Dan knocked down 1 on 7 shots. He says he needs to remember the instruction we got last month and keep his head down!

Scouting day - Friday

It's late, we're tired, and I promise to try to provide more regular updates moving forward. The logistics of the day just didn't permit either of us to do anything before now. Overall, we drove 350-400 miles today. We left the house at 7 to head out & find some pheasant and duck spots. It gets light around 8 here, so we got to our first target spot a little after daybreak. We went West, and checked out several spots near the Fort Pierre National Grasslands (about 110 miles from our base in Plankinton). At one point, just about first thing in the morning, we watched 50-75 pheasants flush from one side of the road and fly in front of us to the other. What a welcome to South Dakota pheasants! We let the dogs out to run for about an hour early in the day. It wasn't a field we expected to see many pheasants, and we didn't... The dogs seemed to appreciate the opportunity to stretch their legs and run off a little energy, after 30+ hours in the truck yesterday.


As far as ducks go, there aren't many. It looks like the migration hasn't gotten going yet, so we may have to work hard & potentially drive north/east to find better duck numbers. That's on tomorrow's schedule - hunt a spot close to the house in the early am, then a quick lunch and venture east toward Mitchell and north of there to see if we can find any more sizeable waterfowl numbers. We'll return to a spot near Plankinton for pheasants tomorrow evening (more on that in a minute...). Also not helping the duck situation is that this area appears to be in a state of drought - with many spots that are shown on maps as water being totally dried-up.


At the end of the day today, we stopped at one last spot and decided to hunt it for pheasants for the last 35 minutes of the day. It looked like it should be productive. We hunted Winnie by herself to get her a little extra running and since it was a small area and we were short on time. Well, in that 35 min., we shot 3 roosters and saw a total of 40-50 pheasants. Many/most of these erupted on the report of our first shot, flushing well out of range. It was a neat sight. Imagine standing in the field, watching waves of 5-10 pheasants at a time take flight. It was more pheasants than I've ever seen while hunting. We killed the 3 birds with a total of 3 shells - both of us hitting rooster #1 at the same time, me catching rooster #2 with my bare hands because it was running and wouldn't fly (and Winnie, being a good pointing dog, doesn't trail fast enough to make it flush). She had found and pointed it before it hotfooted it out off there with her on its trail, but it was leaving her in the dust so we stepped-in to help her. Dan and I were both chasing it (we figure this had to be hilarious to watch) and me finally diving on it to catch it. Rocky may be able to catch chickens, but he's got nothing on me! I'll be honest, I was really wishing I had Mag or Jax with me while I was doing this. They would have loved it, and we wouldn't have been doing crazy things that should be reserved for 20-somethings. Bird #3, Dan shot with 1 shell off a great point by Winnie. This was finally a rooster that sat tight on the point and she held it beautifully. Additionally, Winnie did a fantastic job of finding and retrieving rooster #1 that we hadn't marked well (since those 40 birds were flushing immediately after we shot). We actually got birds #2 & #3 before returning to the approximate area where we thought the first bird had fallen. Dan gave Winnie the 'hunt dead' command and after about 5 minutes, she had the bird and we were all very happy hunters! We will returning to this spot tomorrow.
Below is a picture of a running pheasant early in the day and Dan and Winnie with our first SD roosters.

Safe and Sound in Plankinton, SD

Well, we finally arrived around 8:15 CST. The Maas' (Larry and Dori Maas own the home whose basement we will occupy for the next 9 nights) are a very nice couple and the accommodations that they have set up for us appear to be excellent. We unpacked only our 'essentials' tonight so we can get to bed soon. We'll get the remainder of our stuff brought-in tomorrow.
We're planning to be out of here by 0630 on Friday morning to spend the day scouting and hopefully we'll run into some birds while we let the dogs stretch their legs at a couple of the spots we want to check out for pheasants.
Aside from the problems with the trailer, the drive was pretty good. Weather was good most of the way, construction wasn't too bad, and traffic was very light. We didn't make nearly as good of time as we thought we would because we quickly saw that anything over 70mph caused our gas mileage to drop like a rock. We're trying to stay on budget for the trip, so we elected to set the cruise at 70 (instead of the pre-planned 75mph) to conserve fuel. Even doing that, we only averaged 10.5mpg. We had planned to get better than that, so we weren't able to hit our planned gas stations, but we were able to adapt and overcome and managed to find other suitable stops for fuel and food. Another highlight of the drive was that I got to listen to the RNC debate, so that helped to pass the time...

Here's a look at our digs. In addition to these rooms, we also have a spacious bath. Apparently, they grow their whitetails big out here - these were 3 that Larry shot that he said weren't big enough to go in his office where his 'good bucks' are located.

Seriously??

Well, today didn't quite go as we planned. What we thought/ hoped would be a fairly quick wheel bearing repair, turned into an all day event involving grease, duct tape, and trading in Bill's trailer (Not sure if the grease was for Bill or the wheel bearing). The trailer is far from new, but given that it has 2 working wheel bearings and that it's not being held together by duct tape, it is in much better condition than the old one. 

As you can see, it's not much to look at, but it "should" get the job done. It's now 4:24pm and we are back on the road. We're going to stop soon to grab some dinner and then we will be on the final leg of our journey West.

Not the start we were hoping for...

Around 6:30am local time, driving north on interstate 29 in Iowa, Dan realized that there was a problem with the trailer. After pulling onto the shoulder and inspecting it, we realized that we had a totally blown tire as well as a totally blown wheel bearing. 

While we do have plenty of tools, we don't have the parts or the know-how to tackle this job so we are limping the trailer down the side of the road to a local repair shop who tells us they can fix it. Let's hope they are right.

When I was talking to the repair shop on the phone and they asked where we were at, I told them "alongside the interstate next to a cornfield". They didn't seem to think that was nearly as funny as we thought it would be...

Heading West

First, we met up in Columbus, OH to drop Bill's vehicle at a park and ride. Despite knowing that it would throw us off schedule, (at Bills request) we decided to go in and sit down to eat dinner. I'm so confused by this, I don't know what else to say?

Despite the rain all day here, it has cleared up and and turned into a beautiful night for a long drive. 

We expect to arrive in Plankinton, SD at 9:30am. The plan for tomorrow is to drive/scout most of the day. We will post an update upon our arrival.