The Tar Heel Outdoorsman

My next DIY project is for those of you who are already thinking about next duck season.   If you've hunted open water with a guide, especially from a "scissor rig" on the Currituck or Pamlico Sounds, chances are your guide may have employed a floating "Mojo" or other spinning wing duck decoy.  Especially on the big water, you often need some movement to draw the birds in from afar.   For my weekend-warrior duck hunting pursuits, I wanted to try and recreate a similar Mojo rig.  The biggest issue is, the water's deep.  You're not sticking any sort of pole into the bottom.  And even if you could, the best days are the rough days.  The chop of the sound isn't going to let the thing stand up even if you could get it in the mud.   As luck would have it, on a summer trip to Maine, I spotted an "offshore" lobster buoy washed up on the rocky beach.  I suddenly visualized the thing, perhaps, being perfect for this floating, deep-water...

Who wants to build some big ol' sawhorses?  This is the first of a few DIY projects for those of you, like me, who are always starting another project, another project to better do something---to more efficiently store gear, to make outdoor pursuits a bit more pleasant, or in this case, make your truck a truck again for whatever "truck" activities life sometimes requires. If you've got a camper shell, you probably got it for the practicality.  Your truck is now essentially a "SUV," with all the extra storage, double the storage than those flat "toppers" that sit level with the bed rails, storage protected from the rain, wind, and a bit safer from the opportunistic thief who eyes those tools or hunting gear in your open truck bed.   However, sometimes you want to use your truck for "truck stuff."  That's really why you have a truck after all, isn't it?  Hauling some trash to the dump, moving a couch across town, the list goes on.  ...

It's a funky place, Wilmington.  A weird mix of beach luxury, old in-town money, yet grittiness of a port city with a blue collar and service economy backbone, and poverty and drugs and violence in the "wrong" part of town, and people who grew up there with roots reaching down through generations of sandy dirt, and now more than ever a mix of "new" people from all over and North and West.   It's a funky river, the Cape Fear, and her sister, the Northeast Cape Fear.  It's sometimes a dirty river---industry, logging, chemicals and heavy metals, fuel, both nearby and upriver, and the sprawling semi-urban and suburban landscape of New Hanover and the quickly developing Brunswick and Pender Counties.  It's an old river, full of history.  From the Native Americans who first called the area home, to the English colonists and the raiding Spanish at Brunswick Town, to the economy of naval stores and tar and pitch and turpentine, to the last port and   "...