2019 Waterfowl thread

I gave it one last kick at the can this morning and took advantage of some nice weather by getting out on the lake. It turned out to be a beautiful day, but there was a lot of thick ice in all the major flyways so it was hard to get at the birds. There were quite a few mallards mixed in with thousands of mergansers but they were to hard to pick out to make it a worthwhile hunt. Headed out to open water where I saw a lot of goldeneyes and buffleheads, but they proved to be a challenge to decoy into the few places I could set up. I packed it up early and headed back to the boat launch. I kicked up a lot of birds zipping across the lake and that got birds moving. As a last resort, I threw out a handful of dekes at the boat launch when I arrived and as luck would have it, I got some good action for about 10 minutes and ended up with a limit of buffleheads. And so my season has officially come to a close and the waterfowl gear will be heading into storage tomorrow. Sad times ahead!
 
My season picked up dramatically today. My brother and I shot our limit in a little over an hour. Birds decoyed beautifully even if the shooting wasn’t quite as pretty ;). I’ve been having intermittent issues with Blackcloud #2s not extracting properly from my mossberg pump - bought them from Cabela’s when they had great deal on them but won’t be buying them again. At any rate, we were in the right place at the right time...that rarely happens for me so when it does and my brother is with me, it becomes one of those very special hunts that neither of us will ever forget.

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Well done Runningfool. Hunts like that are always special.

As for your comment with Blackcloud ammo, I had a different experience this year. My Mossberg 935 didn't pattern old Blackcloud very well and I stopped buying it. Then I found a great deal at Ellwood Epps on the “New and Improved” Blackcloud and I was super impressed. I was so impressed with the stopping power of this new stuff that I returned to Ellwood Epps and bought everything they had left. I didn't have any issues with reliability either
 
1963beretta said:
Well done Runningfool. Hunts like that are always special.

As for your comment with Blackcloud ammo, I had a different experience this year. My Mossberg 935 didn't pattern old Blackcloud very well and I stopped buying it. Then I found a great deal at Ellwood Epps on the “New and Improved” Blackcloud and I was super impressed. I was so impressed with the stopping power of this new stuff that I returned to Ellwood Epps and bought everything they had left. I didn't have any issues with reliability either
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I wonder if Cabela’s was blowing out the “old stock” and that is probably what I got.

And congrats on the buffleheads! Do you cook them up any different than the others?
 
Runningfool said:
I wonder if Cabela’s was blowing out the “old stock” and that is probably what I got.

And congrats on the buffleheads! Do you cook them up any different than the others?
Click to expand...

I thought the stuff Ellwood Epps was blowing out was old stock, but it actually wasnt. The new boxes have a red band above the Blackcloud logo that says “new flitecontrol flex wad...”. At $14/box I figure I’d try it out. When I saw how well they performed, I went back and sold them out. Not sure why this new stuff was only $14/box when its about $30/box everywhere else, but Im not complaining

As for the buffleheads, I take the legs, necks and breasts. Neck and legs get slow cooked in tomato sauce. The breasts usually gets ground up and mixed with pork
 
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