"Die hard", indeed! Were you down there that day at Deal Island with us when we sat all morning with a single or two boring into the rig, overcast and cloudy, with the water all "nervous' and the retrievers antsy and whimpering? Temps in the low 30's and a fickle wind made us start to pick up the decoys right before 11:30AM when all of a sudden it went dead calm, the temperature dropped to the upper teens, and a howling wind out of the NW spun our "soft-anchored" boat blind 180 degrees to the gale?
Something told us to stay put; rearranged some brush on the windward side and made the dogs lay low hard. About 10 minutes past noon the sky went the color of the Kansas prarie with a tornado coming and on they came - Cans, blacks, mallards, gadwalls, and our favorite, the widgeon. We had a couple of all-white-painted Carry Lite Canada goose decoys made up to look like Tundra Swan, which the baldpates love, even painted on the black eye masks on them. At the time (1979) MD was on the point system and the widgeon was a 10-poit duck (as opposed to 90 pts. for a hen mallard, a drake can, or a black duck).
We actually had time to pick out the drakes and about every 25 minutes a nice bunch of baldpates would drill the rig. Buddy Charlie Lewis and I were both shooting Remington 870pumps with IC barrels (sorry, Parkerphiles) and 3 1/4 dram, 1 1/4 oz #5 lead shot (legal then), the decoy shooter's "dream load". We killed 20 Widgeon, our limit of 10 each, in about 35 minutes. By the time the dogs brought back all the ducks to the boat and we knocked down the brush from the rig and picked up the decoys, it was blowing a full gale and bitter cold.
By the time we made the half-hour run back to the boat ramp, it looked like it was dusk (actually 2PM) and tracer-bullet snowflakes were raking the marsh. When we skidded the boat up on the trailer, the dogs and all our gear inside the boat went sliding off the seats and floorboards - all skim ice by this time!
Never will forget that day - December 11, 1979, Deal Island Maryland!
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