My good friend Mark Kircher, a fellow PGCA member, and I belong to the same duck hunting club located in central New Yorks Finger Lakes region. In addition to being a couple of duck hunting addicts we both enjoy hunting with Parker guns. The 2013 duck hunting season was much colder than normal. With two weeks left in our first season split, our marsh froze near solid with up to 3 inches of ice. Our 1000 acre marsh looked like a white waste land. We were both depressed that the season was over at our duck club. I turned my attention to deer hunting and Mark continued to hunt the big open water of Irondequoit Bay, a bay that empties into Lake Ontario. While out deer hunting on the uplands surrounding our marsh, I glassed our frozen marsh to discover mallards and blacks dropping into a little hole more than a mile away. The hole was about the size of a basketball court; I estimated 300 to 500 ducks were crowded into that small hole.
I thought what a set up but how to get to the birds? I made arrangements with my regular ducking hunting partner Jeff to try to get to the birds the next morning, a small creek channel with some water flow may make it possible to get close to THE HOLE! The next morning at zero dark thirty I get a call from Jeff that he had caught a stomach flu. He was up all night and sick as a dog and couldnt hunt, dam! What to do???, it is much too dangerous to hunt in the deep freeze without a partner. I knew Mark was an early morning riser but calling at 5:00am on a work day was a long shot. But I thought maybe he can adjust, he is a duck hunting addict after all. Not wanting to wake up his family with a telephone call I sent him a text message on the chance that he was up and willing to give it a go. Thirty seconds later to my surprise I get a response, LETS GO!
We met at our Knoll Landing to find solid ice that you could walk on. Determined to get to THE HOLE we broke enough ice to float the Jon boat and get the Go Devil motor started. We made some progress but the ice finally won the battle. Still determined, we pulled the boat up on the ice and walked the boat over the ice a few hundred yards to where a small creek runs through the marsh. To our surprise the creek was ice free. We pushed the Jon boat into the creek and motored towards THE HOLE that was still a quarter of a mile away. The open water ran out about 300 yards from THE HOLE but the noise from the boat motor caused the birds to flush. Hundreds of ducks taking flight all at once is an impressive sight and makes any duck hunter come unglued.
There was no cover around THE HOLE so we decided to set up at the end of the open channel three hundred yards away from where the birds were sitting. A dozen decoys were set, our boat blind set up and our Parkers uncased and loaded.
Mark is a Parker man all the way. He shoots a 20ga DH early in the season, a 16ga Trojan mid-season and his 12ga Trojan loaded with Kent Tungsten Matrix for hardy late season red-legged mallards. Marks high condition circa 1930 12ga Trojan serial number 235679 has 30 barrels, #2 frame, splinter forend, pistol grip and choked IM/F. I am a recent disciple of the Parker gun for which I take a lot of ribbing from my AH Fox collector friends. I was shooting my circa 1905 CHE 12ga with 30 Bernard barrels, pistol grip, splinter, serial number 131942, choked IM/F. I was shooting 11/8oz Bismuth reloads.
Almost as soon as we were loaded up the ducks came back in groups of from five to thirty. A highball hale call and a few hen mallard quacks interspersed with a feeder call and they were locked up decoying into our little piece of open water. The shooting was fast and furious, in twenty minutes we had a two man limit of ducks. To add to the fabulous hunt we killed every bird we shot at and didnt lose a bird since the ice conditions meant no dogs. The duck gods were smiling on us this December day with an assist from our Parker Guns the Old Reliable.
