Post-hunt report : Ended up going twice. Being in a rickey old boat with an engine that is massively overpowered in 4 foot waves can be a little scary to some, good thing I've fished all of my life. I think the uncle was trying to test me out.
We saw plenty, shot at several, but only brought down 2 each time.
Birds coming in out of nowhere at weird angles made identification damned near impossible on the fly.
Out of the 4, 3 of them weren't dead by the time they were retrieved, one of which we had to turn the boat around several times since it dove whenever we approached it. Post-mortem autopsy revealed that all of them had received lethal wounds.
I ended up shooting one <confirmed>. There wasn't much activity on the lake so the cousin and I were chatting away when the uncle tapped me on the shoulder "are you boys aware that a duck landed over there about 5 minutes ago ?"
Since it was right in the middle of our decoys that were bobbing around in the waves it took me some time to figure out which one it was with the uncle muttering "shoot it, shoot it !!!" the whole time. Ended up pretty much taking a guess and pulled the trigger .... I shot low, water splashed around and the thing took off right towards us. Racked the shotgun and fired again, this time it was a perfect head shot. Feathers flew and the bird went down, only to rise up and swim away with a significant portion of it's head blown off. We managed to retrieve it. I ended up having to finish it off manually by swinging it around like I had been taught the previous time (they don't teach you about these sorts of things in the hunters course), it took 2 tries for the duck to finally stop breathing, I was afraid that if I swung the thing around too hard i'd end up ripping what was left of it's head off.
Many lessons were learned and for the prospective hunter (or for a good laugh to the experienced folks here they go):
An 18 inch barreled shotgun with IC choke firing 3 inch shells is LOUD ... So loud in fact that the cousin frequently dropped his own gun and ended up at the bottom of the boat in a fetal position, good thing I made a point to keep my ear pro on.
They know a lot about hunting, I know a lot about guns, I ended up teaching the cousin what that switch was on the side of his Auto-5 (mag cut-off) and how to use it.
Birds all pretty much look the same when they come it at weird angles low to the water and you're in a boat behind some cattails or whetever they were. To the point where I pretty much relied on the cousin and uncle to fire first whever a bird came in range, otherwise the seagull and cormorant population would have been significantly reduced.
A few minutes after we retrieved the 2nd downed duck the first time I went out (big male mallard), I spotted the thing looking around so obviously it wasn't dead yet. I said to the cousin "err, I don't think the thing is dead", he grabbed it, swung it around, tossed it back in the boat. Yet again the thing looked around. Uncle got pissed off, grabbed it, swung it around, tossed it back in the boat. Again it looked around .... Cousin got pissed off and pretty much went "Bart Simpson" on it, grabbed it by the neck with both hands and strangled it. The whole incident was sort of funny in retrospect. It took awhile for the thing to stop struggling though, not for the faint of heart.
Ducks are amazingly tough critters. It ain't like the movies or those TV hunting shows where the bird magically fall dead. Out of the 4 that we retrieved 3 required manual finishing off. The last 2 were particularly unsettling, one had it's cheek blown clean off with the the beak hanging by a thread, classic head shot, yet was very much alive when we retrieved it. This was the one that kept diving. The last one (mine) also has most of it's head blown off, left eye destroyed and everything, yet was still very much alive when retrieved. I swung it around like I had been taught, tossed it in the boat, then the cousin gave me a dirty look and pointed at it's chest, it was still breathing ! So I swung it around again, this time it worked.
Cleanup job was pretty much like I remembered with the pheasants last year, minus the boiling water trick to get the feathers off. When I inquired about it the cousin just shrugged "they have waterproof feathers so it doesn't work for them". He made it look easy, especially the plucking part. So I grabbed a wing from the scrap bucket and gave one of the feathers a tug, it turned out to be way harder then it looks. Cousin ended up giving me a dirty look, taught me that there's a reason why wings get cut off. So I proceeded to grab the duck carcass in front on me on the cleaning table, got hold of a few feathers expecting they would come off easily,and lifted said carcass right off the table ! A "wtf" moment went thru my head at that time. The cousin sighed, rolled his eyes, then taught me how to do it. Again, something that just isn't taught in the hunters course.
Overall though, much fun was had by all.
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