I get together with Coach J a few times a year for duck hunting. We have about twenty years of college baseball, old friends and past hunts to catch up on, and somehow those weekends never feel long enough.
This one started with a scramble to the riverbank and ended with a goose-breasting lesson on a tailgate. In between, there were long waits, boat trouble, plenty of laughs, an enthusiastic young dog and a nineteen-year-old getting his first ducks.
We took ducks and geese. But that isn’t really how I’ll remember the weekend.
Friday: Straight to the River
I had barely arrived before Coach J told me to get ready. Hunters in boats were flushing birds upriver, and there was a chance they would come our way.
I hurried into my gear and headed for the bank. My phone stayed behind. That wasn’t an intentional effort to disconnect. I was moving too quickly to think about it.
We spent about two hours there. There were mergansers around, but the sight that stuck with me came at and just after last light: geese, then more geese. Hundreds of them, moving in formation well beyond shooting distance.
It was an awesome way to arrive.
Back at camp, we settled into the part of these trips I love just as much. Old baseball stories. Old hunts. Catching up on everyone’s lives and FaceTiming friends who weren’t there. There is a lot of history packed into those conversations, and getting everyone together makes it easy to pick right back up.
Saturday: A Rough Start
Saturday gave us an opportunity early, then a lesson we didn’t want.
At first light, mallards went down nearly across the river. When we went to start the boat for the recovery, the choke toggle broke. After the overnight cold, it seemed brittle, and getting the motor running took about seven minutes.
By then, we had lost track of the birds in the fog and current. We searched for roughly twenty-five minutes and couldn’t recover them. That belongs in the account just as much as the birds we brought home.
The boat eventually ran, but the choke problem hadn’t disappeared.
Coach J’s friends Willy and Bill were with us Saturday, along with Bill’s young dog, Finn. It was only Finn’s second hunt. He had plenty of enthusiasm, including retrieving decoys when he got bored. There was entertainment even when the birds weren’t cooperating.
An unexpected fishing derby brought boat traffic to the river on a bluebird day. We took some later shots that didn’t connect, and otherwise spent a lot of time waiting. By late afternoon, the boats were gone, but we still hadn’t found the action we were hoping for.
Sunday: Forty Minutes of Patience
We returned to the same spot Sunday morning. It was cold and foggy, with that eerie gray light before dawn when you think you can see silhouettes moving but aren’t quite sure.
I loved it.
We were much happier with the decoy spread. For the first time, all five of us were together in the blind Ryan and I had made using my netting and some downed trees and branches. Coach J, John, Collin, Ryan and I were tucked in just off the bank.
Some ducks landed downriver. Then we watched them take roughly forty minutes to work toward us.
It was a real lesson in patience. Other ducks were flying, and we were trying to call them in. Geese were starting to move, too. If something had cupped up and committed to the spread, those slow-moving ducks would have become secondary pretty quickly.
Instead, we waited. And waited.
Finally, Coach J called it. We all got shots off, and ducks went down.
We were still reloading when geese started coming in. Nobody had even made a move toward the boat to recover the ducks. They came right over the top, and suddenly we were shooting again. Geese hit the water, too.
We had barely gotten shells back in after the ducks before the next opportunity was on us.
For as slow as Saturday had been, this was just as fast. Forty minutes of patience turned into about twenty minutes of real action. More than anything, I felt relief.
Then John called out:
“COACH! Those were my first ducks!”
John is nineteen and one of Coach J’s former high-school players. After the grind of Saturday, hearing him say that made the whole thing worth it.
One More Lesson Before Home
Sunday’s recovery went fine. We knew what we were dealing with on the boat, and fortunately the current was very slow. We were able to keep track of all the birds.
We sat for probably another forty minutes afterward. As the fog cleared, hundreds more geese flew by well out of range. More birds came close, but nothing gave us another shot.
Eventually, the fact that it was Sunday caught up with us. We all had commitments at home later that day.
We packed up the decoys. Ryan and Collin took the boat downriver to the ramp, and we headed out.
Before everyone split, we gathered at the tailgate in the cornfield on Coach J’s land and taught John how to breast a goose. He had gotten his first ducks that morning, and before heading home he was learning another part of the process.
That was a good place to finish.
The weekend was successful. Not because of a tally, but because of the good times, the laughs, the anticipation and the firsts. Because of a happy dog finding something to retrieve, a group learning to wait, and a young hunter with something he couldn’t wait to tell his coach.
Those are the things I’ll be talking about when we get together again.
A Conversation Beyond the Blind
We also had an encounter over lunch in Bellows Falls that stayed with me. Some women made disparaging comments about people who hunt. I asked about the chicken and beef products they had and offered to talk, but the exchange ended when they walked away.
It got me thinking about how people see hunters, and how getting into hunting has changed the way I pay attention to animals. That deserves more room than a trip recap. I’m working on a separate piece about it, “Hunting Made Me Care More About Animals.”
The Gear Behind the Weekend
My loadout was very similar to the one already covered in my December Connecticut River Duck and Goose System. That’s the place to start for the gear, rather than repeating nearly the same list here.