Bill Marchel: Scouting trip reveals more than a duck dearth

BRAINERD — "For some reason your boat motor is not getting gas," said the small-engine repairman. "Probably a dirty carburetor. Can you give me an hour to fix it?"

He must have noticed I was a bit anxious.

Two hours earlier, I had begun to assemble my duck hunting gear in preparation for a scouting trip to a local duck marsh. This was Friday, just past noon. My plan was to make a quick trip to the marsh to scout for ducks in preparation for Minnesota's 9 a.m. Saturday waterfowl hunting opener. As an afterthought, I started my air-cooled mud motor while still at home. That, as it turned out, was a good idea.

The motor started OK, but when I opened the throttle, the engine surged and paused, surged and paused, and when I closed the throttle, it would not idle at all. I preformed a few simple tasks to try to correct the problem to no avail.

Great! Friday afternoon and I have boat motor trouble.

I loaded my gear anyway, hoping someone in town could help me on short notice. Janis Anderson, my significant other, accompanied me. We used the boat motor repair downtime to run a few errands, among our stops the local ice cream parlor.

An hour later, we were back at the repair shop. "Just like I thought, the carburetor was all gummed up," said the repair guy. "But it runs fine now. It's ready to go." Eighty bucks later, we were off.

Once on the water, we motored from bay to bay, hoping to find ducks. The far end of one rice-studded bay did contain a flock of a hundred or more mallards, but I knew from past hunting seasons that the spot was tough to hunt. The rice is too thin to hide a boat, and the mallards avoid flying within gun range of the shoreline, the only spot in which to hide.

Another bay produced a flock of about 20 wood ducks. Further on, we flushed two flocks of blue-winged teal, each containing about 20 birds. Overall the outlook for the next day's opener was bleak. At one point the sky remained empty for the better part of an hour.

Dark puffy clouds floated here and there. In between clouds, the sun lit the colorful fall foliage. If the dazzling colors of red, orange and gold didn't bespeak fall, the brisk north wind did.

On the eve of the duck opener, I was undecided on where to toss the decoys in the morning. The next morning, in the gray of dawn, Rolf Moen of Nisswa and I chose the spot, and at first it appeared to be a good one. Before 9 a.m. a fair number of mallards were flying. Once shooting started they disappeared quickly, and by noon there was virtually no shooting going on. We quit at 2:30.

It turned out the hunting report matched the scouting report. We wouldn't have done as well as we did had I not scouted. We harvested six ducks, including two mallards, one blue-winged teal and three wood ducks.