Diver Dynamics

Greenheads and fancy gear dominate the minds of waterfowl hunters this time of year. But there’s a bigger picture. Many start thinking of hunting that first push of diving ducks in November. It’s also when young and new hunters just want to head afield and be able to do so on a shoestring.

Waterfowl hunting isn’t a cheap pastime. When a $40 box of shotgun shells is our least expensive item, we have to cut corners to go hunting. In junior high and high school, I wore the same hip boots duck hunting as I did to run my trap line. They weren’t camo or insulated, but they did the job. My raincoat was basic, and my pack was not waterproof. These were the only things I could afford at the local general store, but they got me out hunting.

The point is, you don’t have to begin your waterfowl hunting career with $1,000 waders, a $250 shell bag, and $2,000 worth of cutting-edge clothes. Like most, you can start with the basics and work up to nice gear that lasts years.

Last season, I spent the better part of a week hunting in Texas with our friends at Realtree and Academy Sports. We hunted specks, sandhill cranes, puddle ducks, diving ducks, and doves. I was pumped to hunt cranes, but I was just as excited to decoy redheads.

Growing up, I jump-shot reds but never decoyed them. The morning we headed across the flats in Captain Storm Brodnax’s airboat, I was like a kid again. Against a glowing sunrise, we started setting decoys. “I like spacing them out,” offered Brodnax, owner of Baffin Bay Fishing & Lodging. “It’s shallow, and the redheads come in big flocks, so I want to give them plenty of places to land.”

We all grabbed strings of decoys, waded into the knee-deep bay, and started scattering them. When the first flock of redheads approached, I thought it was a migration arriving. Hundreds of birds made up the flock. “Get ready; these are going to work,” Brodnax whispered. I chuckled, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t.

“Grab your gun, son,” said Justin Martin of the famed Duck Commander team.  “Take the second bird; that’s the one you want.” I did.

Holding a plump, mature drake, it was the perfect specimen for my office wall. Martin shot me a wink. He pointed out the next mature drake, too, which I also dropped in the decoys, along with a dandy scaup, which I’d shot lots of. I fired three shots and got three ducks. That was all I wanted.

The rest of the crew, five in all, were limited to redheads and scaup, and they got a handful of puddle ducks. In addition to Martin’s impressive calling, what caught my attention was his ability to identify ducks at a distance, and I’m talking several hundred yards; black dots so far away that my aging eyes struggled to even see them. I’ve hunted with many great duck hunters but never seen anyone identify ducks like Martin. And he was just fun to hunt with. In a couple of hours, the hunt was over. 

It was straightforward with minimal gear–other than a pricey airboat. Dropping my coat, gear bag and gun case atop stiff grass, I paused. When Austin McCurry of Academy Sports gave me the rundown on the design and pricing of these and other items, I was comforted to know a company still cares about catering to the needs of a range of hunters. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars in gear to go duck hunting. Academy offers functional gear and clothing at an affordable rate; I especially love their Magellan line of warm weather clothes.

On our Texas diver hunt, placing single decoys in shallow water worked. Back home, I hunt divers in deep lakes where setting up a decoy string made of coated cable and a couple dozen decoys clipped to it every five feet apart is the approach. A five-pound weight anchors each end, and two of these strings make up the spread. Just as important where I diver hunt is being able to move. It’s nothing to change locations a half-dozen times before hitting the spot on a lake where canvasback, scaup, and bufflehead want to commit to.

After cleaning our ducks at Brodnax’s lodge, we ate lunch and then went dove hunting. Brodnax dropped us in a tilled field, instructing us to wait for the doves to start flying. There was little cover along the edge—it was the least cover I’d ever dove hunted in. But it worked, and we all shot doves.

We were putting Realtree’s new MAX-7 to the test on all the hunts I went on in Texas. Be it in open fields for doves, panel blinds for ducks, A-frame blinds for cranes and geese, or standing in tall brush along sloughs awaiting puddlers, this pattern impressed me.

Back in the day, big camo patterns ruled. The large patterns used by the military worked for hunters, with the objective being to create a depth of field using shadows, color, and contrast. 

Over the decades, camo patterns became all about detail. Details catch the eyes of hunters, but too much detail can create a solid look from afar. What I loved about the MAX-7 was the shadow effects and strategically designed grasses that used detail to create an impressive depth of field.

Once back home, I used the same MAX-7 camo and Academy’s line of Magellan clothing, outwear, and gear and killed lots of ducks and geese. The camo worked, as did all the gear. It goes to show there are affordable clothing and gear options out there, and camo patterns are designed to fool birds, not sell to hunters.

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