The Joy of Hunting Divers

Growing up, it was pretty cool having a dad who was the head basketball coach and a popular biology teacher at one of the area’s biggest high schools. It was even better that he was a hunter.

But the pinnacle was when one of Dad’s athletes or students invited him on a hunt and he couldn’t go—so I went instead. That happened many times when I was in grade school and junior high. One trip changed my life. That was when Jeff Heacock and Byron Buss took me to the coast for my first diving duck hunt.

It was the mid 1970s and Jeff and Byron were not only athletes and students of my dad’s, they were best friends in high school, and still are. The wind was blowing and it was raining hard the day I hunted with them. We were on a big lake less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean. Birds decoyed like I’d never seen. Instantly, I fell in love with watching ducks fly inches off the water and skate into the decoys without hesitation. Our boat wasn’t even camouflaged. We went home with a mixed bag limit of greater and lesser scaup, bufflehead, ruddy ducks and ringnecks.

The black and white ducks intrigued me. I wanted more.

Two years later–when we were old enough to drive–my boyhood hunting partner, Mark Brabham, and I hunted that same lake for divers. We grew up chasing ducks and geese in the valley. Now that we had driver’s licenses, it was time to spread our wings.

We bought a dozen scaup decoys but didn’t feel that was enough so painted some of our old mallard decoys black and white. We also tied three white, plastic, bleach bottles to their own strings, something we’d read about in a magazine.

Each decoy had it’s own 50-foot long string with a weight tied to the bottom. They worked fine as long as the wind didn’t blow.

Mark’s grandpa had a 12-foot boat he let us use. My grandpa had a 5 horse motor. The boat had no camo and no cover. We parked it in reeds and rushes. It did the job.

Our first hunt was a success. We didn’t shoot limits but were hooked. We could do this. With each hunt we learned more about where birds flew and understood why. We recognized that on weekends when people were fishing, birds moved more or hung out in the middle of the lake when it was calm.

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The more we hunted the more we learned, largely through making mistakes. One thing we recognized but didn’t know how to fix was that our decoys tied us down. When birds weren’t decoying, we didn’t want to take the time to pull our now big spread of three dozen decoys and putter across the lake in our little boat, especially in high winds and big whitecaps.

There were days we never pulled the trigger. One time we’d just tossed out the decoys and were situating the boat in nearby rushes when a wind storm blasted in from the sea. We headed for cover on a tiny, wooded island and watched our decoys skip across the lake. There was no chasing them in our little craft, not through three-foot waves. Six hours later the wind laid down and we rounded up all the decoys, reaching the ramp at dark.

Mark and I continued hunting through high school and college. Then our adult lives took over and I moved to Alaska.

Four years ago I hunted the same lake with a guide buddy, Josh Farnsworth, who wasn’t even born when Mark and I last hunted it. The approach to hunting divers on this lake had evolved.

During my prolonged absence from home I hunted divers elsewhere, including multiple places in Alaska, the southern portion of the Pacific Flyway and parts of the Central Flyway. I hunted them in rivers, lakes, ponds, bays and on the open ocean. I love it all, largely because they’re so different from the puddle ducks I grew up hunting.

Today, the divers back home behave the same as I remember, but the approach has changed. Farnsworth showed me how he attaches two to three dozen scaup decoys–mostly drakes–to a single line that’s anchored on both ends with five pound weights. He’ll toss out a half dozen single canvasback decoys on the upwind end of the line to stop approaching ducks, and that’s it. Should he need to move, this decoy rigging makes it quick and easy to do.

I’ve hunted with Farnsworth a half dozen times. We’ve limited each time and the main reason is because we moved. If the wind changed, fishing pressure increased, or late season hunters ramped up their presence, birds would often duck into secluded arms in the lake, of which there are many. This meant we had to move to them. One time we were set up at daylight and didn’t fire a shot until 1:00 p.m., after our 6th move of the day. We shot our limits of canvasback and bluebills in that spot, along with four other species of black and white ducks to round out limits.

Fast approaching divers on a stormy day are still hard to hit, that’s remained constant over the decades. But bigger boats, faster motors, a bit of cover attached to the boat and a string of lifelike decoys that are easy to move has taken my local diver hunting delights to another level.

As in any waterfowling, the more you hunt divers with other people, the more you learn. Some tricks will apply in your home waters, some won’t. But that’s the joy of chasing these great ducks and figuring things out for yourself as you go.

I still hunt with Jeff and Byron. We’re all just a bit older now.