Virginia Gun Owners Forum - VGOF

Well, we took our duck hunting trip last weekend. Made the 8.5 hour drive to Reelfoot on Thursday, hunted Friday and Saturday, wound up adding about a 4-hour hunt on Sunday, and drove back on that New Year’s Day.

I hadn’t been in a duck blind for about 7 years – the year before I had 28 pieces of titanium put in my spine (some of which replaces two vertebrae that were shattered), and I was a little worried about how well I would stand up to the wear and tear. Turns out that I stood up fairly well to what proved to be an acid test.

We hadn’t hunted with this guide before, and knew nothing about him. #1 son found him. What we found out by experience was mostly bad. For starters, he turned out to be a self-professed reformed drunkard who had “found Jesus”, but still hadn’t found out how not to cuss and blaspheme with every breath. It tends to make the proselytizing ring hollow and get monotonous fast. It also soon became apparent that he was such a blowhard that we promptly nicknamed him “Onion Sack”, because we felt sure he could blow one up. The guy just couldn’t shut up. Never met a man with so little to say that said so much of it. Not the kind of guy you really enjoy staying in a 8’x16’ box with for 12 hours. Then he proceeded to tell us he was “off on disability” because his arm was injured at work and he “couldn’t do nothing”. But the fraudulent sucker could fire a 3.5” 12-guage all day, pole a boat all over the lake, and muscle motorized decoy rigs in and out of blinds and the water. That’s pretty much when I got totally disgusted with the guy.

At 4:30 am on Friday, he loaded up 4 of my party (my 2 sons, grandson, and one of their friends) in his boat and hit the lake. I, along with a friend about my age, was in another boat operated by a young but very agreeable fellow named Andy. Also in the boat were a couple of blind bags, a large toolbox with over a case of 3.5” 12-gauge shells in it, and all of the 8 shotguns our 6-man party was bringing to the blind. As you will shortly see, this loadout schedule would turn out to be a logistical blunder of the first order – not to mention just plain stupid. It was pitch-black dark, of course, and I failed to recognize that this boat was not typical of Reelfoot boats in that it lacked the extra foot or so of freeboard that most of them had and had a much larger motor on it.

We got about a quarter-mile from the dock when I realized I hadn’t locked my car. I asked him to return to the dock and he complied. As he turned the boat and it came broadside to the wind in the middle of the lake in the 1-2 foot waves that the 20-mile-per-hour wind was whipping up on the shallow lake, the lack of freeboard became frighteningly apparent. But we got turned around in good order and started back without misadventure. As he approached the slip somewhat faster than was prudent, he hit a 6”x6” post sticking about a foot out of the water about 10-15 feet in front of the dock. He must have hit it exactly head-on, because rather than slipping off to one side or the other, the boat pretty much stopped dead in the water. The speed of the boat, the waves of the “following sea” on the lake, and the weight of two people, the guns and ammo and the oversized motor all in the stern combined for the proverbial “perfect storm”. A wall of water came over the transom and swamped the boat. Andy did have the presence of mind to gun the motor and get the boat into the slip before the gunwales went underwater.

When the boat hit the post, because I was seated in the middle of the boat facing backwards, I tipped over flat on my back. Because of my “metalwork”, I can’t sit up without rolling over on my side. It was not a good feeling to be flat on my back in a sinking boat in the dark with cold water running under me and up the legs of my clothes. It was, by the way, about 38 degrees and the wind was blowing at about 20 miles per hour. I knew the water was less than 5 feet deep, and had already told myself, “don’t panic, you can just stand up and walk out of the water even if you have to wade around the pier to get to unobstructed shoreline”. But Andy had other ideas. Having observed that I had some trouble getting around, he must have decided I needed special attention. He leaped onto the dock, grabbed the shoulders of my parka, and heaved the top of my body onto the edge of the dock. This had the effect of “hooking” my armpit over the edge of the dock. My legs, however, were still over the gunwale of the boat, and by now were tangled in the clamshell blind that was attached to the sides of the boat. So I was stretched between the dock and the boat, with the bow of the boat going higher into the air as the stern sank. Andy was pinning my shoulders down with his weight trying desperately to keep me on the dock. This meant that the metal in my back needed to bend in ways it was never meant to. It was unpleasant and painful, to say the least. And poor Andy, bless his well-meaning heart, was sorely perplexed by my reaction to his efforts on my behalf. I dare say the boy learned some brand-new (to him) cusswords that morning. A couple of bystanders came to our rescue and hauled me onto the dock, along with a piece of the boat blind I had been tangled in. In the process, I got soaked up to my armpits and my boots were completely full of water. If you’re laughing, I can understand why, but I assure you it wasn’t one damn bit funny at the time.

My high-tech goretex/thinsulate duds kept me from freezing to death while we fished all the gear we could out of the boat. Then we realized we were one shotgun short. And you thought it wasn’t going to get any worse, right?

While we were hauling stuff out of the water, somebody got word back to the guide, who showed up back at the dock, having left the other 4 of the party in the blind with only one shotgun (his). After thinking pretty hard about it, I got in the boat and went to the blind with the sodden guns and ammo, relying on the fact that the back of the blind was mostly enclosed and had a heater and a cookstove in it; and unwilling to not be there to look after the guns as well as possible.

I spent the first hour in the blind backed up to the heater breaking down and helping to try to dry out and oil 7 waterlogged shotguns. This is when I determined that the missing shotgun was a brand-new Browning Silver 3.5” 12-gauge in duckblind camo that I’d never shot before except to insure that it would cycle. On the positive side, only the bottom layer of shells got wet. Naturally, while nobody had a gun, the ducks were flying pretty good. And they all swore the sky was black with ducks before we showed up with the guns and ammo. Never fails. That changed as the day went on. The only good thing was that the clear weather and warming made my waterlogged condition a little less miserable. Did I mention that the dockside calisthenics had left my back really, really hurting? To cap it all off, my chair leg went through cracks in the bottom of the blind twice and turned my chair over; once backwards, and once forwards. It’s pretty good pain management therapy. The pain in your knees and elbows takes your mind off your back; except that I wrenched my back again trying not to fall on top of the freakin’ heater.

Equipment wasn’t this guide’s only shortcoming. His dog sucked, too. He’d retrieve a duck in open water (but so could a man in a boat), but any that fell in reeds or undergrowth were just lost. This meant we got slightly less than half the ducks we shot into the blind. I’ve been hunting Reelfoot for 25 years or so, and had never encountered this problem before. I’ve even had guides walk out onto thin ice in 10 degree weather to retrieve ducks. This guy just sat in the blind and said, “lost another’n, boys.” At least my elevated blood pressure probably kept me from freezing the rest of the way to death.

Next morning, I just couldn’t get out of bed at 4:00 am. I sent the boys out without me. It meant I was missing half the hunt, but it couldn’t be helped. My fellow shipwreck victim, being a couple of years older and nearly as decrepit as me, also stayed home. We laid around until nearly noon. Then I found a liquor store about 15 miles away and bought a fifth of Glenfidditch. Just the thing for a sore back and sore feelings come dark, I figured. Then I just sat around and vegetated till about 3:00.

Finally, we went down to the dock to look for my gun. The water looked like coffee with cream, and you couldn’t see 2” deep into it. I stirred around trying to snag it with a boathook, but I was only making the water muddier, and I was just about to give up and go get drunk. A guy that lived across the road volunteered that he knew a diver and offered to go get him if I was willing to pay. I asked to fetch the guy ASAP. Of course, I expected scuba gear. But I should explain at this point that the area around Reelfoot Lake is about as depressed and impoverished as any I’ve ever seen; and I say that as a resident of far Southwest Virginia, which has always been the poster child for depressed and impoverished. If you’re old enough to remember Al Capp’s comic strip, the term “Dogpatch” comes to mind. Except there were no good-looking scantily clad females like Daisy Mae and Moonbeam McSwine in evidence. All the wimminfolks I saw out there were built for heavy hauling, if you know what I mean.

So when they guy come back with the “diver”, this woolybooger climbs out of the pickup in shorts, tennis shoes, and a tee shirt. (by now it must have been all the way up to 45 degrees) He blows his nose on his fingers, wipes them on his shirt, scratches his 5-day-bearded chin and gives me a sleepy-eyed puzzled look with his mouth hanging open so he could breathe. He was obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Then he looked at me and said, “Lost a gun, did ye? Would it be worth $50 to ye if’n I find it?

I bit back the “HELL YES!” that almost escaped my mouth, frowned as if in pain (heck, I WAS in pain), and said,”I reckon I could stand that.” To get back that $1,500 shotgun I would have paid 5 times that and kissed his fuzzy little butt. But I decided not to get into that and maybe confuse him.

So the guy jumps into the water without even taking off his eyeglasses and starts feeling around on the bottom of the slip with his feet. First he hauled up a rusty angle iron, then another piece of the clamshell blind they’d pried off the boat with my shins. Then that dear boy holds up a gun case, shoots me a goofy grin, and says, ”that’ll be $50!”. I peeled of a still-wet $50 bill and dang near did kiss that guy - - but I didn’t. The gun, which had been underwater for something like 36 hours, was OK. The case kept all the mud and silt out. It has a composite stock, and once we got all the water out and oiled it, it performed flawlessly on Sunday.

I felt sort of stupid for not perceiving the danger posed by the sub-marginal boat. Still do. If it had sunk in the middle of the lake, or with my sons and grandson, I would have felt much, much worse. I also now see the point of floating gun cases. Always before, my attitude was, “just don’t drop your gun in the water, stupid – and most of the time it isn’t in the case anyway”. I never considered that somebody might sink a whole boatload of your guns at one time. I’ll also tie a 6’ cord with a float to all valuable items next time I go out on Reelfoot. It’s average depth is only 4’. As a matter of fact, I’ve compiled a list of “next times”.

The guide, idiot that he was, felt a little bad about the way things had gone. So he volunteered to knock about $500 off the price of the hunt and take us out for a while Sunday morning to boot. That went off without a hitch and we killed a few birds. I tipped the guy $300 (about half of normal) anyway on the theory that by next time I’m looking for a guide, old Onion Sack would have told all the rest of them what a cheapskate I was if I totally stiffed him. Besides, most of those guys are kin to each other; and besides all that, I felt kind of sorry for the guy. Got home in one piece. Swore everybody to secrecy about the boat sinking within earshot of SWMBO, in case she’d decide I might get killed and oughtn’t duck hunt anymore.

In spite of it all, I still love it. If I could stand THAT trip, I can certainly stand a regular one. I’m going again if I live long enough. But not with old Onion Sack for a guide.

I'm glad that you survived your hunt. Also glad to hear that you got your gun back.

OakRidgeStars wrote:Glad to hear you survived the ordeal, uh I mean vacation.

dorminWS wrote:Then I found a liquor store about 15 miles away and bought a fifth of Glenfidditch. Just the thing for a sore back and sore feelings come dark, I figured. Then I just sat around and vegetated till about 3:00.

Next time, start off the trip by picking up a bottle for you and one for 'ol Onion Sack. I bet he's as handy as a pocket on a shirt with a little liquor in him.

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One detail I omitted in my tale of woe was that the extremely expensive bottle of single-malt scotch my son packed in the trailer got broken on the way out there. That was just too traumatic to talk about. Besides, 'ol Onion Sack was dangerous enough sober. And on a serious note, I don't allow any alcoholic beverages in the same blind with me, ever.