New Year Traditions
 

A bunch of my friends and family have a tradition of having a hunt on a local preserve on New Years Eve. We have been doing this for many years and it is a great time to get together and celebrate. This is a picture of my good friend Larry and my son Doug, we had 9 in our group. OK so it is pen raised birds but still a wonderful time and the labs don't care. My son's 6 month old lab Roxie made her first flush and retieve. How do you celebrate the New Year in the great outdoors???

nice day out guys

I'll bet Lucy did not complain once about them being pen raised

A lot of us go to Major Waldron's in Barrington, NH to ogle other people's fine Parkers and burn some serious powder.

We do have a bunch o' fun!!






.

I walked some ditches today for ducks. After three failed attempts, I was able to get two mallards. Tomorrow is the last day, so back out to chase the ducks.

We usually eat Oysters at a friend's place a little down the coast from us

At the stroke of 12:00 my grandfather would shoot his shotgun off the back porch.
And if the neighbor did beat him to it, he would yell "Damn it Roy, you jumped the gun again"!

Happy New Year

As Dean said, A new years day shoot here in barrington ,but before that it was a duck hunt if we could get out,
scott

This afternoon I will load up the dog and head to L.A. ( lower Alabama ) Pine Apple it has A stop sign. Will visit friends and deer hunt 3 or 4 days. Will give them a peak before turkey season at the GH 10 that found me in a gun shop while bird hunting in Montana this past Oct. Would love to kill ( I do not harvest ) wild turkey 100 using a wing bone call that I made and a Parker.

i m setting here reading about all these good stories and enjoying the hunts...will be in church rest of the day..wish i could be out with you boys hunting...charlie

Nothing wrong with being in church Charlie, It won't be long and you will be back to your old self! good health to you in the New Year, Gary

Charlie Going to church before leaving.

This is the last day of our late season antlerless deer season. I will be in the blind this pm with a fine custom rifle probably in 257R. Not just any doe will do as we have instituted a Trophy Doe theme on the property. I'm looking for that long nosed gray faced old biddy with the sway back. There out there and an old doe is way smarter than a young buck. The problem lies in that the bucks are shedding their antlers so you have to be careful at what your shooting at so you don't accidently kill an antlerless buck. I found a shed while walking to the blind last week.

Years ago my skeet shooting two man team partner and I would go Grouse hunting in the Rapidan Wildlife Management Area this borders the Shennendoah National Park so for Virginia the grouse population is pretty decent but rather VERTICAL !

Now any more I just go out and sit in a treestand and watch the sun come up hoping a deer will walk by .

Biggest difference between now and then is the partying . When we'd go after grouse I was usually hung over and lacking sleep . Now not so much LOL's !

Was out this morning about half an hour before legal shooting time and stayed up the tree until noon . No deer but a very pleasant morning mid 30's and virtually no wind !

I celebrated with about two and a half hours with the snow blower today!!:cuss:

That beats about 5 hrs with a shovel:) I have used mine 3X in December, last year it was 3X total.

Left for Rock Hall with keen anticipation for a 2-day duck hunt last Wed. to MD's Eastern Shore. The weather last Thurs. & Fri. was the best waterfowl gunning weather we have seen in 3 years - birds everywhere with BIG flocks of 'new' ducks coming down from the savage weather in the NE. Tons of birds, both ducks and geese, showed no interest whatsoever in our decoys either day; hunting both field pits and water rigs.

I had a New Year's Eve dinner commitment, so left midday on Friday. Have since found that no one else who stayed killed anything the rest of Fri. or on New Year's Eve day!! Had thoughts on the way home Fri. of visiting a sick friend in the hospital in Easton MD but he gave me a wave-off, which was a good thing since there was a monumental wreck on the Bay Bridge, which they closed shortly after I crossed it which lasted almost 8 hours.

Highlights of the trip included eating fresh shucked oysters on the half shell, seeing the folk art decorations in the Ricaud's Woods (formerly Remington Farms) on the road to Rock Hall, and the 35-foot tall Christmas tree in town made out of bushel baskets decorated by the local watermen and their families, topped off by a steamed version of our beloved Chesapeake Blue Crab. HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Did you get any canvasbacks ? ����

No 6-pt.; as I said no one killed a thing. We saw a nice flight of cans but they overflew us way out of range and didn't look at our rig. Also had hundreds of bluebills in our creek and down the road a bit at Eastern Neck WMA, which was very nice to see. A few 'Jinglers' (goldeneyes) and one confirmed Pintail along with some Widgeon and our usual generous complement of Buffleheads and Ruddies. Great to be out but I was looking for some roast duck to go along with those oysters on the 1/2 shell!

MEMORIES! We would take our boat from the Sassafras to Rock Hall and eat dinner with the Maynes who owned the Marina.
I had a chance to hunt at Remington Farms. The goose decoys were actual taxidermyized geese

Ah---- Remington Farms I was guest in 1981, 36 years ago. I can still taste the chilled blue claws.

John - we leased a nice little waterfront farm on the upper Sassafrass just southwest of Galena but it proved to be marginally productive at best. It yielded a few geese per season out of the stick-up blinds but nothing flew past our duck blind that you would want to shoot to eat. So we moved down to Church Creek Club just north of the Eastern Neck Island WMA bridge at the end of the peninsula, one of the three clubs of Trumpington Manor (Church Creek, Hickory Thicket, and Holly Grove) estate. Despite the close proximity to the WMA, you still have to "hunt" them and there are no giveaways, the weather notwithstanding.

In 1975 a group of us rented a great waterfront farm on Skipton Creek off of Wye Landing, just north of Easton MD. This of course was in the beginning of the heyday of Eastern Shore Canada goose hunting. The season was 90 days long with a daily limit of 3 geese per person per day with hunting allowed 6 days a week. Many was the day we took home limits! The best goose hunting was out of field pits (we had 2) and the duck shooting was OK but not great until the winter of 1977, when the bay froze solid from shore to shore from Tangier Island to Havre de Grace. In the few weeks before the ice closed, everything flew!

In 1983, we had another severe winter with bad ice conditions on our creek. That year was the end of a MD DNR 3-year experimental Canvasback season, which we had scant luck at in the first 2 years. The season was a week long for Cans, limit of 5 birds per day only one of which could be a hen. You had to have a free permit which registered you to report back to the DNR so they could build a data base on kill ratios, sex distributions, and such. We hit everything right that week; broke ice and moved decoy rigs several times a day, rigged out about 6 dozen Can decoys with other species, paid attention and did it right. At the end of the week we totaled 78 Canvasbacks killed, only 5 of which were hens, of which we were very proud. My young Lab learned more in that week than she had in all her 4 years of training and retrieving on the marsh. I will never forget it.

We had the farm almost 20 years, up until 1993, when the son of the deceased owner sold out. The property comprised 778 acres named after 3 parcels designated in the original land grant well before 1700; the Cleghorne Lands, the Long Woods, and Winodee (a contraction of the Scot settlers loosely translated as "Win Or Die." Ours was the Winodee. Below is a photo of the now demolished clubhouse of the Club Winodee.

Rode the KLR over to the Wiggletown AMVETS when it opened and, even though there were a couple of knarly areas, made it in as the First Bike of the Year one more time.

Kevin- We kept our boat at the marina at Galena, and used to eat at the Granary. We would arrive at the marina , load ice into the boat's ice box, then head dowen the river, and spend the night in the cove at Knight's Island

went out with my 11 yr. Brittany to try for some of the roosters stocked by my local club, only hunted for 1 hour and he made beautiful point and I was successful with my 16 ga. Trojan.

Ah, the Granary. Back in the mid 70's through the 80's I had a wonderful farm in Cecilton. We would hunt New Years Eve, celebrate that evening then, if we could, get out on New Years day for a shoot. Usually ended up at the Granary for dinner during the season dressed in camo. Those were the days.

Hunting in South Texas
 

For 11 of the last 12 years I have spent new years in South Texas with dear friends of mine and the better part of those with my son. On a 35,000 acre ranch we have killed many deer, quail, pig and coyote. Cindy knows that New Years Eve is not a holiday we are gonna watch a ball drop. A couple pictures from the years.

That looks like a real nice tradition Brian!





.

now thats a good way to break the ney year in...charlie

Kevin, any idea why they're called jinglers. Around here we call them whistlers. I favour blacks for the plate but nothing beats goldeneye from the blind for action for me.