Duck Hunting Opener - Saturday 9/26/09

This past weekend, the entire family went up to Rhinelander to visit Erin's sister and brother-in-law.  Almost every time we visit, Brett and I do some sort of outdoor activity whether it's fishing or hunting.  This Saturday just happened to be the opening day of duck hunting.  Brett, Chris (Brett's friend) and I left Brett's house at 4:30 am to get out to our hunting spot and get set up.  On opening day, the season doesn't start until 9:00 am, so we were plently early.  We soon found out, Chris had gotten some bad information about property lines, so we had an interesting conversation with the actual land owner about an hour before legal shooting time.  We eventually compromised with the generous landowner and he agreed to let us stay in our spot and hunt for the day, as long as we never show our faces in that spot again.  It didn't bother me that much because I was the out-of-towner, however my gut tells me Chris knew we weren't suppose to be out there all along.  The action in the morning was pretty steady.  Ducks were flying and giving both groups (the landowner's group on one end of the marsh and us on the other) ample opportunities.   The first few ducks escaped some rusty shooting, however we finally knocked down a few by noon.  We hit a slow spot from 1:00 until 5:30, but we stick it out because we had a feeling ducks were goign to congregate to the marsh at sundown.  The last hour definately was busy.   Lots of ducks flying and a couple more in the bag for each group.  Of course, as soon as we started picking up our gear and decoys a huge flock of wood ducks zoomed past our spot.  It always seems to happen that way.  We had tons of gear which made the trek out very physically challenging.  There is a good chance we all lost at least five pounds on the way to the truck.  Overall, we ended up shooting three mallards, two wood ducks and one blue-winged teal.