Preparing for duck hunting in a cold, dark wind before dawn

The north wind is whistling through the tiny crack in the window frame in my bedroom. My eyes are still open. I am trying to fall asleep.

The tiny breeze from the crack caresses the curtains, making them dance a tender ballet. The whisper of the breeze comforts me. Before long I am asleep and dream of driving my duck boat across the bay in the dark with my longtime duck-hunting partner.

The sounds of hundreds of Canada geese can be heard lifting off the water, honking their displeasure at our intrusion. The waves lap at the sides of the boat, occasionally sending cold spray onto our faces, like tiny pellets of ice.

I am navigating by the stars and using land masses as my waypoints. A shooting star flames out toward the southern horizon. The fingernail moon hangs over the mountains to the west, outlining their silhouette.

My hunting partner is on the bow, swinging the spotlight from port to starboard, seeking definition from the shoreline. Minutes later we can make out the rocky ledges that line the entrance to the mouth of the river. As we cruise toward the ledges, we both know it is important to remember that we must make a sharp 270-degree U-turn around the tall grasses, and then a sharp right into the first branch of the river.

Photo by Bradley Carlton.
Tossing duck decoys at dawn.
Photo by Bradley Carlton. Tossing duck decoys at dawn.

Having traveled this route in the darkness many times, he will still remind me of the submerged tree as we bear toward the second branch of the river. We hug the shoreline, mere yards away. Finally, at the last “Y,” we bear right again and winnow our way through the trees that have fallen over in the river, still attached to their root balls.

Finally, as we reach the mouth of the east branch, open water and a strong wind slaps our faces. This is where, in a low-water year, we must prepare to jump out of the shallow-draft duck boat and walk it over the sandbar.

Looking north over the bay, we can see the lights of the Canadian border towns. The wind is stronger here, as it has no landmass to break it up for over 3 miles. The water is cold and an occasional whitecap will lift us up as we hang on to the gunwales of the hull.

My partner is pulling the bow into the wind and I am pushing from the stern. When we reach deeper water, I tell him to jump in while I do a “water start,” which means that I am pulling the starter cord of the old engine while still standing in the water. The engine fires on the third pull, but the boat has already swung around to the starboard quarter, which now puts us sideways to the north wind.

Without hesitation, my partner jumps back out of the cockpit and steadies the bow while I climb back in the stern. He then jumps in with an acrobatic leg swing akin to a pommel horse mount. I grab the handle of the motor and slam the transmission into gear, spinning the boat hard to port, back into the wind.

We work our way cautiously around the edge of the weed bed and then the corner of the eastern delta. The waves are now at our back. Aligning ourselves with the constellation, Orion’s Belt, my eyes drop down diagonally to Sirius, still bright over the eastern shore of the bay. To our west, we follow the twisting weed line of the refuge, where the hidden sloughs and abandoned oxbows of the old river once flowed.

Heading south by southwest, we spotlight the small opening in the distant weed bed where we have planned to set out our spread of decoys. Mallards, black ducks, wood ducks, a few green-winged teal and a small family of Canada geese off to one side.

We are now working against time. Legal shooting is in just 30 minutes, and we need to hide the boat. With the low-slung design of the Barnegat Bay Sneakboat of the early 1900s, our boat is covered in grass. Bow, sides, stern and cockpit. Lifting the camouflaged motor, we pull the boat into the nearby grasses and place a few large sticks and branches in random patterns across and around the bow, the stern and the decoy facing side.

His dog, a handsome, large-headed yellow Lab, is shaking in excitement as we hear whistling wings over our heads. Climbing into the cockpit, we load our guns and hunker down, waiting for the alarm on my phone to signal us that legal shooting time has arrived.

My alarm is set to a duck-call tone. Before it clicks into the last minute, once again, I hear the whistling wings above us. Then the raucous “quack, quack, quack” of the alarm. I sit up and look for the birds.

But it is the wind in the crack of the window frame. I am still in bed. The “ducks” that I hear are my phone’s alarm telling me it’s time to get up and get dressed for another great duck-hunting adventure with my buddy.

(Bradley Carleton is the founder of sacredhunter.org, a privately owned limited liability corporation that seeks to educate the public on the spiritual connection of man to nature through hunting, fishing and foraging. For more of his writings, please subscribe.)