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   "...

Rails.  Marsh Hens.  Mud Chickens.   What fun little birds.  The tide is the big factor---very high, often around a big moon in early fall---high enough that these marsh fowl don't have much of a place to hide, hopefully congregating around the floating mats of dark reeds, or maybe just off some of the higher areas of marsh or a small island with some brush and scrub live oaks.  We push the skiff through the spartina grass, trying to jump some birds.   We strain looking for them.  Sometimes they try to sneak off, we barely see their heads as they slink away through the water, out of scatter gun range.  We have to get close to them for the birds to take flight.  Sometimes we have to almost give them some encouragement with the push pole to hop up airborne.  Sometimes they don't fly far, sometimes they try and make it to the next "hammock" over, the next higher section of marsh.   It's lower, slower shooting than those ...

My blog has been dormant like an alligator in the winter mud.  I'm trying to awaken it from its slumber.    In an attempt to rouse this online place where I occasionally jot some things down, I'm looking back a ways, back to March of '22.  A darn fine weekend.  Or a collection of a few weekends.  Regardless, darn fine.  Oysters and drum and cool, clean, and clear salt water, and azaleas in bloom.     Picking oysters---knocking the too-small ones off the clusters, toss the ones you keep in the fish basket sitting in the still cold, early spring, southeastern Carolina water, still cold and clean, maybe even shuck one of the bivalves for a briny mid morning snack, or maybe it was mid afternoon.  Find a few mussels too, just poking through a mud bank of a small creek, pull them, often connected together in a big clump, out of that dark rich mud that smells like marsh.   A few drum---casting up on the oyster bank, let the jig a...

The old scatter gun was showing some age.  It was the first gun I  paid for myself, with money I saved up from cutting grass and other chores---a whopping $300 or so new.  Some rust showing here and there.  The "bluing" wearing off.  A cracked edge where the stock meets the receiver.   Despite it being a "cheap" gun, I'd always liked how it shouldered, and I felt like I swung through my shots better with the thing---maybe because of the heavier weight of the over and under.  I wasn't ready to sell it for next to nothing.   I'd shot my cousin's CZ "All Terrain,"   and really enjoyed it.  The gun is an over and under featuring a walnut stock and forearm with an "OD" green receiver and barrel coated with Cerakote---in an effort to make the typically less weatherproof over and under more durable in the field.  I thought it looked cool too: (https://www.gundogmag.com/editorial/cz-redhead-premier-allterrain-shotgun-review/466807...

I'll preface by saying this---I'm a very novice turkey hunter.  I've only been a handful of times.  Never shot at a bird, never seen a gobbler . . . and to be honest, never even heard a gobble while out turkey hunting, though I've heard them when other outdoor pursuits have called me into the woods or the swamp or onto the river.   I met up with my cousin, Jay, for opening weekend of turkey season.  The other side of his family owns some land near Laurel Hill.  The land is largely used for timber.  Lines of pines in neat rows, so open in the understory that you could drive a truck though, with a bed of pine straw covering the sandy ground.  There's almost no underbrush, aside from the stray hardwood, and the stray dogwood, blooming now with their white petals. It's cleared from regular prescribed burns and raking, I learned, so some money can be made off the straw while the trees grow.    They don't call it "the sand hills" for nothing, ...