Good CX Ride and End of Duck Season

Well, this past weekend, my father and I headed back into the woods to finish out the duck season. Arkansas' season ended this weekend.

Before I headed over to AR, I managed to get in two laps of the Tour De Wolf Trail on my SSCX bike. The trail was in great condition and was a lot of fun. Very fast rolling on those narrow nobby tires.....

Saturday was a good day with everything right about the weather except the wind.... Everytime we'd get a group working down to the treetops, a gust would come along and blow them away (literally). Got pretty frustrating, but you can't control the weather.

Then Sunday rolled in. Again, we were heading for the woods of Bayou Meto..... As we loaded in the boat road and got the WarEagle on plane, the water was nearly freezing on my face as it splashed up.... it was cold like you don't feel otherwise. Normal people don't get to have experiences like this.

As we rounded one of the corners around Hallowell, we saw a few boats pulled up against a little island just off the boat road. As we went by, people started hollering and flashing lights in our eyes. We rolled on past and they yelled louder. At that point, I told dad to pull the boat over. As we did, it got stuck in a shallow spot and one of the people at the island started screaming that 'you wouldn't be stuck if you'd just pulled over when I yelled at ya!". I replied "I don't know who you are or what you're doin!" The guy then hollered at me that he had yelled "Game Warden", but I could not hear that over the boat motor- and I told him so.

It was a pretty interesting situation. Boats lined up like cordwood against this island in the woods at 4:45 in the morning with skim ice floating around the bases of the trees..... A group of hunters was gathered around a bonfired the gamewardens had built on the island. They might as well have gotten warm as they all were getting tickets.

The wardens searched our boat and checked over our licenses as well as our guns and our shell bags. As we floated there, wardens kept yelling at boats coming around that corner.........

I'm not an outlaw, so we got out of there with no citations and no warnings. Definitely a good thing.

Back on the boat road, we raced on down to the new hole in the woods we had scouted out the previous afternoon. This area was in an area of the woods that not many people went to because there was no way to get your boat to it easily. Good news was that the wind was gone..... Bad news was that it was replaced with ice on the water and heavy cloudcover. Well, the ducks don't like the woods when its cloudy in my experience, and watching the fields as we left that morning, all the ducks were in areas they were able to keep free from ice. I'm guessing between the clouds and the ice, we just were not bound to see a duck - and we didn't...

Next season will be fun. We found a few new holes to hunt, and I learned a few tricks to create opportunities to hunt. I just have to make sure to take advantage of what I learned.