Hydro hunting - outwitted by birds

The rain was torrential at 1am and still falling at 04.30 when I hit the road. In the car I had the layout (pre-grassed), a bag of Higdon Alpha 3/4 body goose decoys, the gun, 150 rounds of goose medicine, a swag of wet weather gear, blind bag with coffee and Gingernut bikkies and the unpinned gun. (I have to say that having to constantly dick around to remove the magazine cap of the Xtrema to put the mag plug in/take the mag plug out is a pain – the mag cap has a flange with a lip that needs to be depressed from its slot and in the process I’ve broken one cap already). The reason for all of this was the dark of the moon – theoretically the geese don’t have enough light to navigate with so ought to do their feeding during the daylight hours, so they should fly to feed during the day.

It was still chucking it down when I arrived to meet with the crew. Andrew arrived first and then Lick & Coch showed up. We waited for Dickie who had decided to “do some work” - finally getting him on cell - and having finalised that we were it we set off. Out with the dekes, layouts setup and then the lads went to park their trucks. As Coch and I waited in the gloom, the first flight of geese passed by. Finally we were all set, with umbrellas up to ward off the incessant rain. At least that was the theory – my brolly imploded with a gust of wind and ended up with broken spokes sticking out all over the place. We waited. And waited some more. Geese could be seen lifting off the big lake and either heading for the sanctuary lake or dropping in on far off paddocks. Our setup appeared to be a bit out of their way. At least there was some wind; Met Service had predicted a still morning however Predict Wind & Metvuw both said that there’d be a north easterly and they were to a certain extent correct. Finally we coaxed a flight of geese down and after much circling they committed, but to one side of our spread… we axed down the birds that we could under the circumstances. Much later a flight of 4 came in and were dispatched – and then the wind changed, turning a complete 180 degrees!

Where are the geese?

The rain continued (we bailed out our layouts with our coffee cups!) and now with a biting southerly, birds began to really get up and go – mostly large flocks of ducks, some teal and huge flocks of swan. We spun our layouts around, reset the dekes and waited. Finally a flock committed nicely and we laid into them… and then that was it. Where were all the hungry geese? At 11am, we retreated. Not defeated as we had 15 birds down, but something wasn’t quite right. Having not worn my waders, the rain had leaked up inside my over-trousers so I was nicely damp from waist down and it was getting cold, so I was quite happy to be moving. Decoys and layouts were packed in record time. We got back to the cars, I packed my stuff said bye to the lads and headed off.

An hour later I got a text from Coch. “400 geese went in after we packed up, no kidding!”

Wouldn’t that rip your nightie.

UTU! I want Utu!