9/14/2020 Third Annual Mississippi Early Teal From Kayak Hunt on Public Land

My dad (Big Daddy to the kids) came in town last week and we decided to go on a “dove hunt” but really just ride around with the boy and the dog and shotguns (just in case) and check out mud holes and small ponds on public land (Upper Sardis WMA outside Oxford, MS). One of our stops Tuesday 9/8/2020 was Cypress Lake, a place I have hunted with very minimal and fished with zero success in the past.

We relaxed on a bench at the end of the steep and muddy road down to the boat ramp and noticed a group of 10-15 blue winged teal on the far north end of the lake. They flushed in the general direction of northeast and I made a note to not repeat my first teal hunt of 2019 mistake this year.

Rewind to 2019 teal season, before the opener I knew that teal were at Cypress Lake because I saw them scouting. There weren’t many birds but there were a few. I scouted some other places on the Tallahatchie River and despite seeing zero teal, I opted to hunt a slough opening morning to no avail. I later drug my best good hunting buddy Austin Holt all the way down to Muscadine Farms only to slice my hand open and not see a teal within a football field.

Eventually I wised up and went back to Cypress Lake where I should have gone all along.

Back to this year (2020). I didn’t hunt the Saturday opener because my busted eye hurt and I had minimal and blurred vision out of my right/dominant/shooting eye. Sunday was a little better, but not much. I decided Sunday night, as my eye continued to make decent progress healing that I was going Monday (9/14/2020, third day of early teal season) come hell or high water.

I woke up at 5:10am, loaded up six Texas rigged blue-winged teal decoys, my lifetime tamarack angler 100 kayak and wirehaired pointing griffon, Dublin, and headed off for Cypress Lake. I parked at the same bench Cal and Big Daddy sat a few days earlier and quickly loaded the gun, 7 1/2 Upland Steel shells, and my modest spread and push poled through the surface vegetation to a small island halfway across the lake. It was just 2 minutes til shooting time so the decoys were tossed with only a little bit of care and love and me and the dog hunkered down and started swatting mosquitoes.

Two singles came in and over right before legal shooting started, followed by a group of wood ducks. Eventually, after swatting at a particularly large group of mosquitoes I noticed a dozen birds get up from behind me that had apparently put the sneak on me. The dog noticed too and got really antsy. The teal made a few passes and were joined by a few more before sweeping behind me and then right over the decoys on their way out of dodge. I fired three times, knocking a bird down on my second shot.

Dublin, full of adrenaline from the previous 45 seconds of excitement lept from our non-existent blind and retrieved the flopping head shot blue-winged teal. I was so tickled to be able to continue this what I would know call an annual tradition of killing one early teal from a kayak. We waited for another 10-15 minutes before the bugs drove me and the dog back to the house. I’m going to try and knock down a few more before the sesaon ends in ten days.