Anderson: At Bud’s Landing, it’s carry on as before for Minnesota duck hunters

Ron McNamara is no Huck Finn. But McNamara, like Huck, knows something about nighttime travel on the Mississippi River.

“If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it once – you’ll see," Huck said in Mark Twain’s, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

McNamara, 76, has hunted ducks for 65 years, mostly on the Mississippi, oftentimes launching his boat well before dawn on October and November mornings.

Duck hunting isn’t what it used to be on the big river, he said.

“On the opener this year with my son and grandson, we never fired a shot” — a never-before-reached low point in his long waterfowling career.

But McNamara, who lives near Afton, cheered up the other day when he heard Dakota County commissioners had reversed a plan to bar waterfowlers from launching their boats at Bud’s Landing near Hastings.

A river rat of sorts, McNamara at one time hunted further downriver from his Twin Cities home, near the Weaver Bottoms 90 miles away, just him and a buddy.

He still thinks about those days, the low gray skies and the big river’s currents swirling downed birds into pools and eddies until they could be retrieved.

“Then about 25 years ago I started launching closer to home, out of Bud’s Landing,” McNamara said. “I was using an outboard on my boat at the time. But the river got so silted in, so shallow, I had to buy a mud motor. That’s what I use now for hunting, a long-tailed mud motor.”

Mostly forgotten, Bud’s Landing, on the Mississippi’s west side, was the subject of a Minnesota Star Tribune story by my colleague Tony Kennedy on Dec. 2.

Kennedy reported that Dakota County planned to convert the site to a carry-in access where canoeists, kayakers and paddle boarders could launch their craft onto the Mississippi.

But duck hunters would be cut out, because in the new design, vehicles with boat trailers wouldn’t be able to turn around or park.

The site would also gain a less user-friendly name.

Rather than Bud’s Landing — the moniker hung on it beginning in the mid-1930s when Bud Joseph founded it — the site would be called the Spring Lake Park Reserve Mississippi River Access.

As much a hangout as a launching site, Bud’s Landing, the business, featured rental cabins, bar food and 3.2 beer.

“Bud was my uncle,” said Larry Josephs of West St. Paul. “When I was a kid, Bud’s Landing was the place to be. Not just during duck season, but also in summer. Everyone got together there. Polish families. Jewish families. Black families. Mexican families. If you wanted a boat, Uncle Bud would rent you a boat, $5 a day. If you wanted a motor, he’d rent you a motor.”

Anglers and hunters who needed bait or ammunition could buy those at Bud’s, too.

The business closed in 1985, and Bud Joseph’s son, Gene Joseph, sold the property to the county in 2012. Since then, hunters have had to obtain $10 daily permits from the county to launch and park at Bud’s Landing.

On most days during recent waterfowl seasons, only a handful of permits have been issued, said Dakota County Parks Director Niki Geisler, who expects a similar number of permits to be available beginning in 2027.

The site might be closed this year because of construction.

“Under our new plan, the site won’t be a public motorized boat launching location,” Geisler said. “There’s not enough room there to accommodate that kind of traffic. However, we will be able to provide enough parking spots for a limited number of duck hunters’ trucks and trailers by closing the site in the hunting season to other uses.”

The county had been concerned that allowing parking for vehicles and trailers at Bud’s Landing would disrupt habitat for the federally endangered rusty patch bumblebee.

“The updated Mississippi River site will be well used,” she said.

Maybe so.

But today’s visitors will never know the excitement of the place long ago when, in the dark, waterfowlers launched wooden boats with tin-cup motors and headed upstream to the nexus of the Mississippi River and the islands that helped form the large backwater that is Spring Lake.

This was mallard country, mostly, and at daybreak the wind oftentimes picked up and sleet rained down and later the snow came.

Paddling a kayak or a canoe can be exciting.

Dakota County commissioners did a good thing when they accommodated waterfowlers in their revised Mississippi River access plan.

They did one better by including “Bud’s Landing” in the name of the revised site.