Duck-Hunting Guides Tell All
Billy Blakely
Editor’s
Note: For 23 years, Billy Blakely has hunted ducks every
day of duck season on Reelfoot Lake’s Bluebank
Resort near Tiptonville, Tennessee, in Tennessee’s
northwestern corner. Most of the guides who work with
him at Blue Bank Resort hunt 40 to 50 days each season.
They’ve seen all the mistakes duck hunters make
and know how to solve duck-hunting problems. Let’s
listen to the confessions of these duck-hunting guides
and learn how to solve some of our own duck-hunting
difficulties.
“At least twice a year, we’ll have a hunter
show up to go duck hunting with a brand-new shotgun
that’s never been assembled and still resides
in a cardboard box,” Blakely reports. “He’ll
take the cardboard box and get in the boat with it.
Once we get the gun to the blind,
we usually have to put the gun together for him, show
him where the safety is, and try to teach him how to
shoot. Generally that first-time duck hunter will stand
next to the guide supervising.
“One morning, while I wasn’t looking, one
of these nimrods put his shells in backwards and got
his gun jammed-up. Now, shells will go in an automatic
backwards, but the gun won’t work. Once we got
the shells out of his gun and loaded it properly, he
had a good day of shooting. After the hunt, he took
the gun apart and put it back in the box when suddenly
the spring that fed the shells to the magazine popped
out of the forearm and went into the lake. He’d
shown up with a brand-new gun, was able to shoot it
for one day, but couldn’t shoot it the next day
because he didn’t have
a spring for it. He had to borrow a gun for hunting.
We had another hunter show up who started firing when
the first flight of ducks came. The barrel and the forearm
of his gun fell into the lake. One of the guides had
to get in the water and fish the front half of the man's
gun out. Then this past season, a hunter had his gun
sitting in the rack when for no reason at the entire
gun went off and blew the brush off the blind. The hunter
never touched the gun; it just went off. Somehow when
he sat the gun on the floor, the firing pin hit the
shell and caused it to fire. Everybody jumped backwards,
scared to death. However, what happened wasn’t
the hunter's fault.
“On another day, I didn’t have a dog with
me because my dog had cut its foot. When we knocked
a duck down behind the blind, one of my hunters said,
‘I’ll go get
it.’ I told the hunter not to get the duck because
the land was so wet and marshy. However, he was one
of those hunters who knew it all, and he insisted on
getting the duck. The third step he made away from the
blind he went out of sight, and all we could see was
his hat floating above the water. We all had to climb
out of the blind and pull him out of that sinkhole.
Another hunter came to hunt one morning during duck
season and still had the tags on the hunting suit he’d
bought from L.L. Bean. On this cool morning, this hunter
backed-up to the heater in the blind to get warm. But
he got too close the heater, after I’d already
warned him and caught his brand-new hunting coat on
fire. He started running down through the blind like
a mouse with its tail on fire. We caught him to beat
the fire out, and honestly, he needed a good beating.”
To learn more about duck hunting at Bluebank Resort,
call (731) 253-8976 or check out www.bluebankresort.com.
Tomorrow: Shane Upchurch
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