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.
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