So after our failed jump shoot about 2 pm İ was getting restless. I had the boat packed and waiting. But I'll watch football. Nope. Ok, I can find it on the radio and work on other stuff. 34-0 at half time. Ok, I'll just go.
Daughter has Jeep with the hitch and the Expedition isn't going to handle this launch.
But the kayak fits in the Expedition.
But we've just sold a cord of firewood and they're loading it in the barn driveway. So I help them load like a mad man, back in and grab some stuff from the boat and throw it in the truck and take off.
There's 100 mergs where I want to hunt. And a five acre shelf of ice from shore out. And I grabbed the goldeneye decoys and not the merg sleds. And the 20. Mergs die hard.
Paddle out leaving the gun and gear bag on shore and set up. Only to have mergs trying to land on me. This is gonna be a five drake trophy merg slam. But the water is so deep I only have eight decoys that reach bottom and those are with one or two feet to spare.
Paddle back and put the spinny and decoy bag with the short decoys in the truck and watch mergs work.
Paddle out, back the kayak into the ice to hold it in place. Did you know divers come in on the deck and not up high, and with trees behind them and very few drakes in the flocks are hard to see? And now they are buzzing the edge of the ice and not my spread? So I move 100 yards away on the edge of the ice.
Single comes in, shoot way behind it.
Pair comes in, miss the head on, then they go weak side. I line up the 20 and shoot it one handed Terminator style. I've had that work before. But not from a kayak in 30' of water. Don't do that again.
Soon about eighty mergs pile in 100 yards out front and start to party. When they broke out the sushi bar it was trouble, so I went to bust them out. Picked up the kayak paddle and they bailed. The same birds that tried to land on me while setting up are now spooked by a twitch at 100 yards.
But mergs make mistakes too and one circled around the decoys then bailed over the ice, saw me and flared straight up at twenty yards. Throat punched her with an ounce of twos.
She came down like a meteor and punched a 6" hole through the ice behind me.
The ice over there, behind me, that's much thicker. Sigh. By getting a running start I can slide up on it then break it. Ten minutes later I've got my merg.
Only to figure out I broke the ice so much that with the wind the whole bit broke loose and now me, my merg, and my decoys are drifting across the lake stuck in a huge ice jam. So I had to break that piece up to get my decoys back.
And somehow during all that nothing else worked.
Might try something new on those mergs tonight. Or might not...