Duck Hunting (from Dec 1st, 2007)

I finally found my camera (how sad is that, that I lose my camera for a month?)!

Ben and I went duck hunting and camping a month ago, and it was such a fun experience! We went with some of Ben's friends from Flagstaff (the McReynolds). This was my first hunting experience, and it was all and nothing like I thought it would be.

We went to the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge (Topock Marsh near Needles, CA).

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We drove up there on Nov 30th, and the drive there was extremely long for two reasons: we still had to pick up some supplies and pick up our license and duck hunting stamp. It also took a long time because it was the weekend of best rain storm of the year, so traffic was bad and there were some flooded areas on the way there.
Here’s a wash that actually washed out the road with a foot or so of mud.

We finally got to the campsite, that Ben’s friends were already at, close to 1 AM (after going to wrong campsite… its hard to find the right place in the dark, especially if you never been there). It was really cold that night, since it was raining while we were trying to sleep. We had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go make the drawing (everyone who wanted to hunt had to draw to find out which blind we were sitting in). I didn’t take any pictures of our camping site, but here are a couple of pictures of the blind we had on the first day.

This is where we sit and wait for the ducks to fly by so we can shoot at them.

Since we had just got the huge rain storm, it was soo muddy, that Joe McReynolds daughter, Ariel, had too much fun in the mud.

All together (both days that we went), we got about 20-25 ducks. Joe put on his waders and had to go out into the water to get the ducks. Here are the ducks we got on the first day. The second day, the mud in the water was not solid enough for us to retrieve the ducks. Ben would just sink deep into the mud each time he took a step.

Here are some pictures of me, while I was in the blind.

Ben and I had a lot fun, despite of a few frustrations (i.e. we were missing a stamp on our license, so we had to drive all the way into town to get the 2nd stamp before we could go into the blind). We were happy to go home, relax, crawl into our warm bed, and go to sleep.