JGUN wrote:DeadEye_Dan wrote:Got checked by a CO yesterday and he was looking at the birds and asked if we had anything other than squaw and scoter (cuz reds and bills are everywhere)...said "nope, didn't even bring diver decoys".
He sorta chuckled.
But not too much.
Even though he wanted to.
Did this one want to know which birds were yours?
He was a little disappointed. Gene went last and once we were down to 6 TJ picked up his rig and hauled ass, figuring we'd be 20-30 minutes behind. The CO was in a 16ft Gator Trax with a surface drive...no way he'd catch TJ with that 250 E-tec in open water (or us either, if we wanted to run)
The CO said he'd been watching us for almost 2 hours, asked if we knew those "other guys"...said yep. By the time he got over to me, I had 11 birds in the boat - my 6 in one pile and Gene's 5 in the other. I think he thought he was gonna get us for a HUGE group limit...but the other 40+ birds were in a 25' DW 6 miles away going 45mph.....
He was pretty cool, really. He cautioned me about having a gun out on a cripple run with the motor running. It popped up once, and I motored over with the gun up - ready. It never surfaced again...I'm probably lucky it didn't, cuz I woulda shot it and he would've had me. It was the only crip we lost from our boat this weekend. If he'd seen me shoot the one that dove and then came out of the water flying while I was running 15mph on Friday, he'd of had my ass too.
That was a helluva shot!!
And for the record: when we layout hunt, pretty much everybody shoots their own. But if we hunt from the big boats as a group...we just make it rain and let God sort them out.