Duck Shooting in Broadwater Bay
As regularly as the old year grows into the new, father and I drive to the ferry on New Year's eve in time to catch the Norfolk Express. The cab is always quite filled with our traveling bags, a bundle of toys for Conover's children, and our guns -- old friends by this time -- and rejoicing in as affectionate nicknames as ever pet dog or cat had. Father took his trusty ten-gauge hammer gun that can throw shot harder and further than any other gun I have ever seen, and I took both my ten-gauge and my heavy eight-bore, an excellent gun.
The porter called us at 5 o'clock. At Nassawadox Station at a quarter after five next morning we found a man waiting to drive us the three miles to Conover's house, where we were warmly welcomed. There was a blazing fire in the best room and we warmed ourselves while Conover and his son loaded our things on the launch and got on board the supplies needed at the
Red Bank Creek winds in and out through the marshy meadows and around patches of wooded high land, doubling on itself twice between Marionville and Upshur's Neck, where it empties into Broadwater Bay. The land south of the creek is known as Fowling Point, and it is between this land and the marshy islands some four miles to the east that the famous feeding grounds of the ducks lie. At high tide this is covered with five to seven feet of water, and at low tide the great expanse is almost bare, except for The Sink, a favorite feeding ground.
Conover's gunning house is built upon piles driven in the meadow on one of the islands to the east of The Sink and consists of two large double rooms, a dining room, a kitchen and a loft where the guides sleep. At low water it is necessary to follow the Great Machipongo Channel twelve miles around the flats, but we crossed the flats at high water, arriving in less than an hour.
Conover waited on father, as they say down there, and his son, Dave, on me, and we started through the creek on our way to the blinds which dotted The Sink. Dave rowed me past several of the nearest blinds to one in the middle of the Sink, and here we put out our decoys to the windward of the blind and shoved our boat in among the boughs. In the bottom of the boat, pushed under the stern, we carried a large bough and this we placed at the stern for the two-fold purpose of hiding the boat and keeping it from being washed out of the blind by the waves.
These blinds are built with long cedar boughs stuck in the mud at low tide in the form of a triangle, the exact size and shape of the gunning boats, and they come up above ordinary high tide high enough to be readily seen, but not enough to afford any cover to a man in a boat. As the tide rises and falls from five to six feet, they are made as low as possible so that they will not loom up so high when the tide is low, and they do not cover the boat until the tide has gone down nearly two feet. All the shooting here is done either on the rising or falling tide, for at high and low water the birds go out to the deep water of the main bay and remain there until they can feed again in the Sink. This causes two flights during each tide, one in and one out, giving four chances at them each day. When we shoved into the blind I was much worried by the scantiness of our cover, but Dave assured me that we would be able to hide by the time the birds began to fly, and afterward I found he was right.
My first shot was at a bunch of geese which came flying straight over us high up in the air. My old eight-bore spoke to them with a charge of BB's from the left barrel, and two came tumbling down. We picked up our birds just in time, for a flock of brant rose out in the channel and came toward us, Dave and I calling to them with all our skill. They saw our decoys, circled and set their wings, giving me a splendid shot. I got a double with each barrel of my ten-bore and another with my eight.
It was rather amusing, the changes in position as the tide went out. First we moved from the bottom of the boat to the boxes, then to the gunwales, then we put the boxes on the deck and finally ended by standing on these in a vain effort to shoot over the blind. When the tide is so low that you cannot reach over the wall of boughs to shoot, it is necessary to thrust the gun out between the branches, and I defy any man to keep his temper as miss after miss follows his best efforts to shoot straight. Under these circumstances it is impossible to follow a bird with the gun down through the boughs at the point one thinks the charge will intercept the bird.
In this way I made one good shot at an old black duck coming down before the wind about fifteen feet above the water and forty yards away, traveling at the rate of sixty miles an hour. That bird must have run into the center of the charge, for he was struck so hard that he turned over and over in the air. People who have never known the enjoyment of sport with the gun often wonder at the vividness with which events stand out in the memory of the true sportsman. If any such benighted one had killed that black duck as I did that morning it would have afforded them great satisfaction to live that event over again in their minds; not once, but hundreds of times.
It was after 1 o'clock when we took up our decoys and set out for home. When father and Conover joined us we compared notes and I found that father had killed more ducks, but had not had a shot at geese.
After lunch Dave and I went out to a blind to the east of the house where he thought we might get a chance at the broadbill as they flew by on the way to the Cobbs Island Bay. The tide was so low that we had to do all our shooting through the boughs, but nevertheless we brought home twenty-six. There was not a breath of wind stirring and the surface of the water was like a sheet of glass and we congratulated ourselves upon the ease with which we would be able to get any birds we crippled. But we counted our chickens too soon, for it happened that the first flock I got a shot at went so wide that I only killed one dead and crippled four more. We marked them down on the water about sixty yards away from the blind and pushed out as quickly as possible. In the short space of time it took us to do this all four birds disappeared, and we never saw any of them again, although we hunted around for a quarter of an hour. I have often seen crippled birds exercise wonderful ingenuity in escaping, but these four broadbills were certainly past
masters in the art of sneaking. I have found many a cripple self drowned by holding on to a sea weed stalk in the shoal water on the flats of Great South Bay, but here there was no sea weed and what became of these birds is a mystery to this day.
At noon the next day Dave and I set to work thatching over a little dinghy with grass and reeds, and that afternoon we crossed the sink to the marshes on the shore side in quest of black ducks. We went up a small creek and hid our boat in the tall grass, setting out a dozen decoys in the middle of the creek. Just as the sun was setting, the birds began to come into the marsh, and I got a few shots, killing five.
One day we varied our sport by a trip to Cobbs Island Bay for geese, but were unsuccessful. With varying luck day succeeded day, each one seeming shorter and more complete in its enjoyment that the one before, and it was with heavy hearts that we set out in the launch one afternoon to begin our journey home. We bade good-bye to Conover and Dave with keen regret, drove to Nassawadox and took the evening express train for New York, a fund of fond memories for future musing in our minds and our bodies thoroughly refreshed by ten days in the sunshine and fresh air.
Before closing this article I want to tell those who think they cannot afford such a trip just what it cost, for the sum total is a small amount to pay for a ten-day vacation and all the attendant benefits. License, $10; ten-day return ticket, $14; Pullman berth, two ways, $4; wagon, two ways, $2; ten days with Conover, including guide and board, $50. Eighty dollars in all, and how many people throw that amount away on dinners, the theater or flowers, people who say they cannot afford a shooting trip. I recommend such a trip as an investment that will pay larger returns than any savings bank in the world.
EDWIN MAIN POST.