Memories, madness and magic are all part of the drill for those who have the passion and the perserverance to hunt ducks. My own has been limited to the inland varieties of puddle ducks and divers with a few specific forays for geese along the coast and sandhill cranes out west. Sea ducks and sink boxes remain outside my experience, for the present.
A tale I will tell on myself is from several seasons removed and we, my best friend & I, were 40 miles S. of Texoma sitting in a fairly comfortable pit blind dug in the side of a tank dam, if one can forget the bitter cold rain that was coming through sporadically and the water that was below freezing but hadn't and that was better than ankle deep in the blind and my old gum boots, a very poor choice for that particular morn, that needed new rubbers at least a season earlier. The ducks had been semi cooperative and we had a few, mostly Bluebills & Ringnecks shot from that particular blind and that's mostly what we had, perhaps a Widgeon or a teal was in hand as well. Mostly it was just colder than a well digger's arse in the Klondike, but the rain finally let up and the ceiling was low and then out of nowhere we see this white 'V' from the N., a flight of snows! Bonus geese, we call 'em. They are essentially directly overhead when seen & looked as big as a B-29 doing a stealth mission below the radar. I pulled up and fired against a uniformly gray/black background and the third goose back falls dead as a stone. My bud says, "Great shot!"
As much as I would have liked to have taken the credit, I had to tell him, "I was shooting at the lead bird."
