South Australian Duck Hunting - Opening weekend

Hey guys,

I've been offline for just under a week now, I've been out of service on a lads weekend away. In fact its my favourite time of the year.

17th of February 2018 - 15 minutes after first light, The Duck hunting season begins. I've always been taught to keep my hunting locations private. Unforunately as people talk about things & advertise how good hunting locations are, they tend to become popular and fair enough. But when they become too popular it starts to ruin it, and often cant be reversed.

So i'll reserve my right to keep the location private, but try my best to share how awesome duck hunting is. If you haven't tried it and hunting is your thing, then you need to get into it. We had been planning this for weeks, if not months. There are 6 of us in the hunting party, The full party is 11 people, made up of family and friends. We were lucky enough to be able to afford to hire some accommodation near the water and share the cost.

The lads had been at the location doing some fishing and scouting. I wasnt able to get away from work for a week away, but the plan was to arrive Thursday afternoon and leave Sunday morning. Thursday was spent getting set up and scouting a few possible locations on the water and where we planned to build our hides.

Friday morning - late rise, 8am we got up and packed for a day on the water & walking, we walked around looking for our hide locations and started to scout where the birds were landing and what we could expect on opening morning. We marked out spots with a decoy. On friday afternoon we ventured out again to build out hides, we spent hours building our hides with the materials available. Logs and branches from dead trees around us, close to the water in locations we knew the birds would pass through. Its important to respect the environment around us and make sure we're not giving any protesting groups more reason to prevent us from hunting these beautiful locations. We got our gear from the boats into the hides, Ammo, duck calls, masks, gloves were all ready for us come opening morning.

Saturday Morning - opening day - we woke up at 4am, started to pack the boats and make sure we had enough food, water and our guns for the day. We got on the boat and moved into the location. It was about a 500 metre walk from the drop off point and we got into our hides at around 5:30am. We talked a bit and got our selves prepared for first light. SA law states the opening is ~15 minutes after first light.

We had a really successful morning, Plenty of shooting was done, the SA bag limit was 12 birds each, we finished the morning with ~22 ducks. Our party of 11 met our full quota available. We ended up with Black ducks, wood duck, Teal, Mountain Duck & 1 Pink Ear. Most of the ducks we shot were Teal or wood duck, All good Eating!

We usually shoot the afternoon as well, but given we had 100+ birds to pluck, trim, gut & Bag.. it took up most of the afternoon. By the time we were finished there was no time, nor any bag limit for us to use. We went and packed up our hides and restored the area back to normal. We had a feast of lasagna with the full group, celebrated and shared our stories with each other.

Sunday morning we packed up and headed back to Adelaide, still excited for the months of the duck season that remain.

Here are some pics from the weekend.