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Probably best to keep the pit blind discussions going here since I don't know Rick to be in the market.

Hoping to pull the trigger in next month or so to give ample time to arrange for removal of the old one (what we gonna do with that?) and installation of the new one, ideally while growing season is still lengthy to come and we can get some natural growth around it. Hope to get a report this week of state of the fields.

Marsh is coming off a very high tide event over the last week with persistent east winds putting it 2-3 ft above normal high tide. Unlikely a significant detriment to the feed situation but we've got a loooooong way to go with the start of hurricane season officially next week. Will have a hard time waiting out those later months of the season given how we were sucker punched in October last year with a 100 mph storm right through the lease.

In the meantime, I've got a few small projects here and there, some of our field duck decoys to patch up/replace, etc. and surely the little camp needs some TLC. Carpenter bees are giving us hell and the glass traps are usually filled easily.

Carpenter bees are giving us hell and the glass traps are usually filled easily."

Ouch!!!!! Who needs cicadas when you've got Carpenter Bees?????
Hate those things, and it feels pretty good when you can break out the badminton rackets and pass them out to the kids at the camp for practice. Shooting them out of the air with a bb gun is pretty entertaining as well.

Plenty of them to be shot there just tough to get up there in the timeframe they're most active (now). They are making quick work of our recent improvements over last couple of years so we'll need to do something, be it preventative of structurally reactive to their efforts to weaken what we've built.

We’ve had some luck making faux hornets nests from a paper grocery sack filled with plastic ones. Evidently hornets kill carpenter bees.

But like Deltaman mentioned, most effective method has been beer and badminton racquets, though that’s also a tough combo on light fixtures

My buddy made a pass by the bee camp today, said they weren't too bad. State of the field below

Also of note for this season........we've sold off every single one of our fullbody snows and blues. Though it had started to grow to what we had in mind for numbers, it wasn't killing more geese and was creating more pre-hunt work than we wanted to deal with. Our water control is challenging and overnight rains were routinely resulting in half-sunken bodies, or some floating off, all to be dealt with before LST.

Have kept all the FB specks and added some more floaters at season's end as well. Will bet it will not be a less-attractive spread to specks, and will be a whole lot easier to manage.

Unless you had a heck of a mess of light decoys, I'm thinking you'll find specks easier without.

Rick wrote:Unless you had a heck of a mess of light decoys, I'm thinking you'll find specks easier without.

Wasn't season-wide, but on certain days of last season we had goose traffic in numbers I'd not seen there before. Lot of circlers, lot of lookers on these days, not a lot of finishers.

Our revised approach will be at a minimum far easier to manage, but also is based on the premise of what we observed one day last season off Hwy 71.......piles of specks loafing/feeding in a deep flood of rice stubble. Turns out, yes, they will actually use something other than the mud/puddles terrain so many insist on having.

Interestingly enough, the neighbor blind had what we thought perfect speck ground, mostly mud with some puddles, all season long. Didn't see them kill a single goose.

I'd just as soon mine showed plenty of clods for geese and big ducks, thank you.

If only we had the water control.....

We're better off just adapting to the big floods. It was a nice 3-4 inch flood to start on initial flood but when those rains started in December, it got knee deep and beyond in a hurry on the north cut. South cut seems to be holding a decent level, more so in the shin ballpark and we've not gotten ambitious enough to try to pull the board the farmer's been using.

If he'll let you cut your own boards and regulate water, that was a very valuable asset we had at my old lease. Could adjust boards based on forecast or let water out after big rains.


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Ericdc wrote:If he'll let you cut your own boards and regulate water, that was a very valuable asset we had at my old lease. Could adjust boards based on forecast or let water out after big rains.


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We did just that, cut our own board.......but the existing board already had water against it by the time we could get to it and would thus be really tough to get out.

One other thing to keep an eye out on this summer will be ammo supply, currently very scarce. I'm afraid the "out of stock" designation from the usual vendors will be all too common.

Darren wrote:

Ericdc wrote:If he'll let you cut your own boards and regulate water, that was a very valuable asset we had at my old lease. Could adjust boards based on forecast or let water out after big rains.


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We did just that, cut our own board.......but the existing board already had water against it by the time we could get to it and would thus be really tough to get out.

So your drain ditch water level was as high or higher than the cut level?

I took a measurement from the top of my structure when I had ideal water level to know where to put boards too the following year.


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Darren wrote:One other thing to keep an eye out on this summer will be ammo supply, currently very scarce. I'm afraid the "out of stock" designation from the usual vendors will be all too common.

Capture.JPG

You right and with numb nuts in charge who knows where this is going.

DComeaux wrote:

Darren wrote:

Ericdc wrote:If he'll let you cut your own boards and regulate water, that was a very valuable asset we had at my old lease. Could adjust boards based on forecast or let water out after big rains.


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We did just that, cut our own board.......but the existing board already had water against it by the time we could get to it and would thus be really tough to get out.

So your drain ditch water level was as high or higher than the cut level?

The drain is set really low in the SE corner of the south cut (way front left if you're sitting in the blind). It piles up water there before the area in front the blind is flooded. Farmer uses machinery, reportedly, to lift the board(s) out, so we dont stand much chance doing it by hand. The board is cut at the preferred height.....just need to have it set before the flood.

Darren do you have a picture of your water control structure? Seems way more complicated than anything I have seen.

I might somewhere but it's really not complicated, just a big culvert drain with the slots on the side, probably an 16-18 inch culvert. Slots accomodate a sheet of 3/4 inch plywood as your board and just overflows the level of that board. Those boards get warped and waterlogged so they inherently get tight in the slot so harder to pull out than something impervious like PVC you see on the more common drains from cut to cut.

If I think of it, I'll take a pic of a board gate on tomorrow morning's county round. Very seldom see a single plywood sheet here, as it's usually stacked 2x4 or tongue-in-groove 1X boards for depth adjustment - and ease of pulling to drain.

Rick wrote:If I think of it, I'll take a pic of a board gate on tomorrow morning's county round. Very seldom see a single plywood sheet here, as it's usually stacked 2x4 or tongue-in-groove 1X boards for depth adjustment - and ease of pulling to drain.

Same here very easy to pull a board.

Stacked boards of smaller width would be far easier to manage, tongue and groove type fit or something like Rick said. That's NOT what we've got, and these boards are very difficult to remove. See pics I had from couple years back








Note a few fields drain via this field and thus via this culvert.

Not sure but what even 1x tongue and groove would fit in that sorry version. Here's what's in common usage here (with a reminder, albeit non-venomous in this instance, to use caution around feeding stations, er...water controls):

Darren wrote:Stacked boards of smaller width would be far easier to manage, tongue and groove type fit or something like Rick said. That's NOT what we've got, and these boards are very difficult to remove. See pics I had from couple years back

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Note a few fields drain via this field and thus via this culvert.

Pas Bon

Thus, it is what it is. It's effective in holding us water, so we'll credit it with that the most critical facet. Front cut isn't the issue, instead its the rear (north) cut that gets DEEP on us.....and its the one the ducks go to most commonly on their own.

Could u use pieces of plywood instead of solid sheet much like using various sized pieces of lumber?


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Ericdc wrote:Could u use pieces of plywood instead of solid sheet much like using various sized pieces of lumber?

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Definitely, dont have a full measurement of total length we'd need right now but it could be done to make the sheets more manageable to remove.

I had to rebuild a couple of gates for the Gueydan farm we hunted after they were damaged by a bush hog. I copied what was there and it used tongue and grove slats. I have pictures on my other old, stored computer and I'll try dig it out of the closet and post a few pics here. I thought I had those pics in this forums hunting logs but realized it was another forum that is no longer on line. They were very easy to set. They do attract snakes, especially if it's flowing during draining.

Rick, what was the name of that forum? Time sure fly's when you're having fun.

I've forgotten, too, but it was a good one for a while. Do remember the Marceaux's wooden boxes not holding up to the Drainage Board's brush-hog well.

DComeaux wrote:I had to rebuild a couple of gates for the Gueydan farm we hunted after they were damaged by a bush hog. I copied what was there and it used tongue and grove slats. I have pictures on my other old, stored computer and I'll try dig it out of the closet and post a few pics here. I thought I had those pics in this forums hunting logs but realized it was another forum that is no longer on line. They were very easy to set. They do attract snakes, especially if it's flowing during draining.

Rick, what was the name of that forum? Time sure fly's when you're having fun.

Probably The Pit Blind