doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com First good day.....

Hunted this past weekend and we had what I'd call our first good day. Now I've shot quite a few ducks and geese already this season, but to me the first good day is when you kill the first big divers of the year. Three of us in the boat, my regular gunning partner Nameless Jim, and a new shooting acquaintance Brian, who took these pics:


First light, mallards coming off the marshes.


My first big divers of the season, a double on drake redheads. The dog went for the first one and I was so excited I jumped out to grab the second. I hate those spinning wing decoys but the boys insist on using them.


My trophy for the day, and a first for me, banded greenwing teal drake! This has been a crazy season for bands so far, I've seen 11 taken and killed three of those myself. Opening day in Ontario Brian killed a banded blue wing teal, first banded teal I'd ever seen shot. Then the day in the pics, I kill a banded teal while out with him, not 400 yards from where he killed his.


A real mixed bag here, amongst 18 ducks we had: mallard, gadwall, gw teal, an accidental shoveler, canvasback, redhead, bluebill, and could have shot bufflehead and ruddy duck if we'd have wanted them. Just to make this a double gun related post, I was using my Parker 34 inch 12 gauge on a #3 frame.

Destry, nice pictures.

Thanks for sharing. Hope you guys have many more 'good days' to come. Good looking blocks, too. Are they Herter's or ..?

Destry, ya gotta give the dog a chance;-) I mean how would you feel if he had shot one of YOUR double?

Another gentleman who handles a 34" Parker rather well is Cyril Adams.

Destry, same weekend the most spectacular flights of blacks I've ever seen: more than 100 coming in at a time. We saw more than a thousand before we left and they were still coming in to fresh water at the edge of a cornfield. We didn't bother with decoys. To keep the Shangri-la hidey-ho "fresh", three buddies and myself took only two birds each, sat in the open for a half-hour watching the show and went home. A sight to last me the rest of my life!

TW,

The best of this flock are hand painted E. Allen birds that a friend did up several years ago. He's out of the game for a couple seasons due to a run in with the warden so we're hunting part of his rig and ours too.

My sneak boat rig is the best of the best as far as what I own personally. All cork birds in redhead, canvasback, and bluebill that I had made by Tom Humberstone over the course of several years. Will hopefully be posting some pics of that kind of shooting in the coming couple weeks.

I think I've met Cyril at one of the double gun shoots. He probably handles his better than I do. I missed a perfect shot on a big bull canvasback that would have been my last bird of the day and my first for the season. The other boys both killed one though, so at least we broke the seal.

King,

The blacks must really be up in numbers this year. In Quebec during late September we saw more than we've ever seen. Kaas and McKormack have been hunting up and down the East Coast of the US all their lives and both said they'd never seen anything like it. Hopefully some of these show up soon where we gun in Ontario. We did pretty well on them last year later in the season so I'll cross my fingers. Sadly the black duck season goes out in late December but the rest of the ducks continue till mid-January.

That beats a day of work any day!

Destry good on ya !!one would think with me living in the middle of an ocean,on an island that has to be 70 % water that I would have good duck hunting ,but other than what I jump while ptarmigan or grouse shooting I see very few...I maybe bag 6-10 black's a season.....I geuss turr shooting don't count .

All the best

That's pretty funny, Cartod.

With apologies to Destry for jumping his thread;

Anyone ever out there hauling a duck boat, setting a spread, brushing a blind or boat, painting a boat, painting the blocks or re-painting them as the case may be, putting fresh anchor lies on them, casting new lead wrap around weights for those good vintage cast iron ones lost to the muck the previous season, being sure the dog is in good shape and that he has had breakfast while you are trying to make yer own & the coffee and remembering to fill the thermos and get moving, but forgetting which pairs of wadders still leaked at 3AM, &c is guaranteed to be doing plenty of work, but it beats the heck out of flying a desk & most day jobs for sure.

I think of a guy that I once hunted with who had arguably the world's best decoy retriever; his dog had not a clue what a real duck was, but it could retrieve multiple decoys w/o so much as a command and tangle five or six lines doing it most every time too and it worked him as hard as any duckhunter I have ever seen;-)I can tell ya, its pretty tough to keep a straight face when someone is working that hard.

As always, Destry, "You da man." Murphy

Took out the sneak boat this morning for the first time but the weather man lied to me. Was supposed to be cloudy with a wind at 10mph by 6am, when we picked up the rig at 11am it was still bright and clear with the wind at zero.

Needless to say, we didn't fire a shot, to kill them sneak shooting it's gotta blow at least a little. Was good to get all the gear out for the first time though, give everything a shakedown. We had a little problem with the motor that didn't hold us back from going out but wasn't something that I'd have wanted to happen when it was blowing 15 one day with three footers rolling the bay.

Felt good to put the oars in the locks, though I'm a little stiff from the effort. The boat is an old wooden planked job that's been glassed over, I use a small motor going to and from but once we're out there it's mostly the oars for putting out and taking up the blocks plus going back to the float after a sneak. Always rusty the first time I row for the season but it comes back pretty quick once you get started.

Going to give them another try on Friday, weather is supposed to be nasty. We saw huge rafts of big divers this morning, they're definitely there, just wasn't the day to get them to handle into the rig. If the weather for Friday comes like they say it is, that will be the day.....


Destry