Jerry's View: She couldn’t hurt a flea, much less a duck!
I did not know that duck hunting in the Skagit flats required a boat due to the huge tidal flow that goes in and out through a myriad array of channels. Tree stumps dot the channels, victims of the brackish water.
Together, with my buddy Cliff Goodman, we motored across a great body of salt water stopping at a huge stump where he let me off and headed out looking for a stump for himself.
We couldn’t afford a real Duck Blind. The stump was our best bet to conceal ourselves.
Overhead a million Mallards and Teal were darkening the sky. How could anybody fail to limit out even on his first trip with a shotgun he’d never fired; not even once. I envisioned a barrel of ducks on the kitchen counter.
I had hoped grampa's 12-gauge shotgun would be more reliable than my aim but with a million birds up there who could miss?
What I did not know was that the tidal waters we putt-putted over, while looking for a comfy stump, concealed an unpleasant surprise about three feet deep.