The morning started out great, the alarm sounded at 4am and my wife turned it off. At 4:30 the dog wanted to go out so she jumped on the bed - good thing or else this report would end right here. So now I'm in a hurry. I knew my waders were in the truck from last night so all I had to do was get dressed and leave. After I put on my clothes, got a drink, told wifey I was leaving (which really went over well since I woke her up again to tell her), and got in the truck I knew I had just enought time to get to my buddy's house. Well, this is when the day got bad. I got about 15 minutes into the ride and started a mental check of my equipment. Waders - got 'em. Shells - got 'em. License - got that, too. Gun - Uh oh! Too late to turn around, so I make the call nobody wants to make.

Jeff: Hello
Me: I got a dumb question.
Jeff: What's that, buddy?
Me: Can I borrow one of your old guns, I forgot mine?
Jeff: (laughing) Sure, you can use my old Mossberg.

I pull in his driveway at 5:15 and he is at the door. We load up all the gear and head to the marsh. There we meet another buddy. There is almost no water in the marsh, but we will make it work. Decoys out. 2 mallard hens and 2 drakes - same with black ducks. Every thing looks good, now we wait. Nothing flew for quite some time until a rogue set of teal come in. 3 down. Cool, no skunk. Get the birds, all hens. The decoys are now sitting on the mud completely. While it's slow we decide to move them down a little where there was a little water. About 6 steps into the marsh, I try to take a step with my right foot and my foot comes out of the wader boot. Evidently, I'm not very good at the balance thing - down I went. Now I'm stuck. My buddy comes over and helps me up, laughing again. We - more like they, get the decoys in some water and we were in business. Probably 2.5 hours go by with nothing. All of a sudden 5 black ducks come in to the decoys. Two shots, one bird. I guess we shot the same bird because we both saw our bird fold when we shot it. Oh, well. We leave for the morning with 4 ducks, not too bad. Before we came back in the afternoon I put on 2 more pairs of boot socks. Damn foot won't come out now! We get all set up and in no time we were covered up in ducks. They came from everywhere since there was no wind. This next part will make most of you chuckle. 9 black ducks come in, we fire everything we have at them. Nothing falls! Of course it had to be the guns fault, or maybe the shells. When ducks fly in to us, we usually don't miss too much. Couldn't have been us. 3 more blacks come in - I get one shot off and the gun jams - my buddy fires 3 times, nothing falls. By now I figure everyone in the marsh is laughing at us. Before long 4 mallards come in and we manage to kill 2. A couple minutes later another pair of mallards check us out and we get one of them. Shooting time was getting close and neither of us remembered a watch, but we saw a guy down the marsh get out and leave so we figured we should, too. Total for the day 7 birds. Not bad, should have been 12, but it was one of those days. We get the camera out of the bag to snap a photo, and of course, the batteries were dead. Fitting end to a comical day.