DComeaux wrote:NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Dammit! I loved that old engine. How in the hell did they burn the damn pump?
If you remember, the one big issue we had was when Blake and I were in the blind and the pump was slow running to add just a bit more water while we were hunting, A few hours into the hunt I heard the engine lug and the belt squeal. I never got out of the blind so fast, and I think I walked on water to get to the bike. It had ingested a piece of old timber. Luckily the crude belt tightening system (conass engineering) allowed the motor to slide loosening the belt and it jumped the pully. I miss the challenges of that place. I wish I had the money to keep and maintain it.
I really, really hate seeing those dead baby mottled ducks. What heck would kill those and not eat them, a rat? Did a deer step on them?
I'm still trying to understand the double levy at the east blind. In the photo with the white goose decoys, is that the same levy that the 12' blind was on in the thick roseaus? We had the one good year out of it when we had the whole farm. Tucked under and in the middle of the cane we had thinned just a bit, they never new we were there. The specs loved that cut. My son still talks about those hunts today, It was wonderful.
When Jack had it sublet, he flooded the cuts south of the east blind without having to first flood it's huge north cut by scooping out a shallow lateral along the access road to the blind's south cut. The spoils from which were used to create a levee between the lateral and north cut. This guy apparently planned on abandoning our east blind and just carried that concept on down its levee to the next N/S levee and then followed it south until he got to the big cuts on the south end of the east piece. Tickled me that he screwed up what appears (judging by apparent usage) to still have been his most productive blind site, but not that he made such a mess of the farm in the doing.
He did, however, have sense enough [u]not[u] to put his middle field blind on the levee where Lopez put the 12-footer (we abandoned and eventually moved to the east blind location for Jarren's crew) I think you're talking about. That levee's south cut was very narrow and screwed it up. He put the blind where Lopez should have on the next levee north, with big cuts on both sides. I'm guessing that more likely the levee you've hunted and know it's a spot I'd sometimes slip into for speck pairs for our house way back when we kept the whole farm.
Re: the ducklings, your "deer" theory gave me some pause, as they looked more stomped than run over. I'd imagined a farm hand doing so, then not knowing what to do with his prizes, dropping them in a pile, but hadn't considered a deer.