Clider Day 4, Round Lake, bitches.

Oh man, Rocky got a limit of birds at Round.  That's seven, in one day.  That's a ton of birds, did you see how happy he looks?  I'm pretty sure he shot his first bird that morning.  I'm going to Round now too, I've been wanting to go for awhile, but the boat makes everything possible.  So freaking pumped.

 Ken and I were in the boat an hour and a half before shooting time, we were on a mission to scout out this legendary spot.  Opening day this place sounded like a war zone, we were sitting out at the Other Point listening to everyone skyblast away.  Today we would have it to ourselves, today we shoot 100 greenies.

After establishing that the short route was indeed choked with grass we turned around and took the two mile river route.  The sun was coming up behind us as Bob sent a the message that he was already set at the Point.  Upon entering the lake we started scaring up huge rafts of coot and ducks, this was already an awesome day.  The full moon had given way to a pretty amazing sunrise, Bob was still mired in fog at Anderson.  We looked around but everything was flooded reeds with solid ground well back from the open water, far away from anywhere the birds could land.  We frantically pulled into the thickest reeds we could find and threw out a small spread, hunkering down in three feet of water.  Nothing wanted in, probably because we looked like idiots.

After the initial fly was over we loaded back up and went looking for a real spot.  Rocky sent me a photo of his haul, I used this photo to figure out what part of the hill he was across from and we actually found the same spot.  It was pretty obvious when we pulled up, dozens of shot wads were floating in the shallows, spent hulls were littering the ground.  We set up in the tattered remains of an old blind and did a few minor improvements.  Birds came and birds flared.  After many repeats of this we decided to take out a sizable loan and upgrade the cover.

So sleepy

Forty minutes later we had a pretty respectable blind, so we sat down to enjoy our new fort.  Ten minutes later our first committed bird came in, a merganser came straight in from the front.  Wings set from the beginning, no circling, feet out, our blind was working.  He was about two feet off the water, maybe twenty feet at the most from my seat.  It was a solid hit and Peat brought him in.  A short while later another merganser committed the same way, this one went to Ken.  He connected and I swear the finishing shot hit square, but the little guy started out for the middle of the lake.

I ran to the boat but I couldn't get it started due to a slipped throttle cable housing.  While I was messing with that Ken watched his bird go under and never come up again.  I should mention that after Ken's last outing he had invested heavily in patterning, chokes, and practice.  This was a blow, we motored around but to no avail.

It was almost mid-day and once again everything was flaring(possibly due to the orange marking tape we failed to notice in the front of our blind).  Of note was a particularly large, fat, green headed bastard that flew by so slowly that it appeared he was about to fall from the sky at any moment.  This oafish bird smelled of freedom fries and maple bacon.  He eyeballed the blind and never altered his coarse, a straight line about fifty feet past our blocks.  The skanky looking hennie with him was obviously his bottom bitch, no doubt they were off to snort oxycontin and swill some rye.  Bob had attempted to end him earlier that morning and he decided to party it up to celebrate the missed shots.

On our way out we took all the trash from the hunters before us and headed back towards the river.  In all fairness it was mostly wads and they had collected in a nice floating raft on the week since they had been shot. Noticing a raft of ducks we tried a little raid where we drove straight into the flock, tossed six decoys as we went through their spot and then hid the boat quickly.  They circled and a few even landed but we had ended up too far from the decoys when I tried to hide the boat a little too far into the reeds.  They circled for about ten minutes and we packed it up.

It was already 1:00 by the time we were halfway up the river, exploring is exhausting.  We found a way to cut half the boat time out next time, we can carry everything about a hundred feet over the bank to the same spot.  While we were investigating this plan I stumbled across what may well be the centerpiece of Bob's garage soon, we'll see what he thinks. The hot spot later in the day was once again an area that is perfect, if you have a boat blind.....


Duck Bites....