Today did an afternoon duck hunt in SE NH with one of the NH boys Pete Lester up along the Cochecho River near Dover. Today the weather was beautiful. Sunny and blue skies with temperature in the upper 50's and hardly any wind.
On our first set up, there were hardly any ducks moving. Probably stayed here for a couple of hours with no action at all. With the tide starting to go out that would make our trek away from shore quite difficult, we headed out to another spot.
We found a nice little cove and noticed about two dozen mallards feeding. They spotted us, spooking all of them flying away except for one hen. We went a little bit further down river to get on shore so Pete could sneak from behind to flush the hen to me to shoot it.
I started walking and I spotted the hen swimming the edge of the shoreline at about 40 -50 yards. She lifted up trying to make a break for it and I fired the right barrel with a 1 1/4oz of #2's and she dropped like a stone.
This is my 8 pound Lefever G grade 12 ga. with ejectors. The barrels are 32" long with .040 extra full chokes. This was intended and built by the craftsmen at the Factory to be a wildfowl gun for sure.
The guys from Classic Gunstocks did some work to de-oil only the head of the stock and Dan May blended it all in for a perfect match.
On another river, the owner of the white Ford 150 pickup Scotty Kittredge and Billy Janelle put on a clinic bagging 3 ducks, two geese, and one of them was banded.