Adventures on the water and in the woods

I began hunting at a very early age, using the money from my News Journal paper route to buy a Remington single-shot .22 rifle from Richardrson’s store on Philadelphia Pike in Claymont. Buffington’s sold .22 ammunition, and I went thought several boxes plinking tin cans and soda bottles behind my house on Wister Street.

I knew the area between my house and the Delaware River pretty well since I had been playing there from a very young age, and I thought I could find a few rabbits in the underbrush. I soon discovered that finding a rabbit and hitting one with a .22 while the rabbit was running were two different things.

My stepfather had a Winchester Model 12, full-choke 12-gauge shotgun that he offered me. That improved my odds, but unfortunately, the kick from the 12-gauge caused me to flinch, a trait I have carried ever since.

I hunted all through high school, carrying my shotgun in my car so I could get to the squirrel woods without having to go home first. Can you imagine carrying a 12-gauge shotgun to school today?

Most of my hunting was restricted to rabbits and squirrels during high school, with the exception of the one deer I killed during a very early deer season in 1959. The next four years I spent in the Navy, and the only hunting I did was on leave.

When I returned home, I fell in with a band of misfits that were friends of my girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, Barbara Twilley. These guys loved to hunt and fish, so we got along very well. My brother-in-law Bobby Woods and his close friend Tommy Bonner were the ringleaders, and we had many adventures on the water and in the woods.

My grandparents had a mobile home on a friend’s farm in Laurel, and we hunted deer there. I say hunted because as I recall we never shot one; we just hunted them.

One year we hunted in the morning and then drove over to Ocean View where Bobby and I had our camper trailers. Bobby had his wood Grady White in a slip and we went striper fishing. I hooked and landed a 35-inch rockfish at Indian River Inlet on a white bucktail before we headed back to Laurel and the evening hunt.

Mark Legget leased some land in Somerset County, Md., and it was covered up with deer. I took a deer there every year until the owner harvested the timber. That is where the eight-point hanging on my wall came from.

That buck seemed to come out of nowhere. I was in my usual stand, and he came up from behind me running full speed through the woods. I got off a quick shot from my Marlin .35 Remington lever action, but that just made him run faster. The second shot made him turn to run in front of me and then stop facing me. The third shot put him on the ground.

A good friend of mine, Dave Rockland, leased a piece of land in Maryland and asked me to join the lease. Smartest thing I’ve ever done. That property was full of deer. I killed one every year I hunted there.

Of course, the real pleasure was the absolutely wonderful Canada goose hunting I experienced at Snow Farm. Almost everyone who had a permanent pit was connected to South Shore Marina. I fished out of there on my late brother-in-law’s 22 Mako Little Boat and Bud Hurlock’s Slow Polk. Charter Captain Ben Betts invited me as a guest to hunt in his pit a few times one year, and the next year he set me up with my own pit. I had to get five other hunters to split the $1,200 fee, and that was very easy.

The next year, Jimmy Snow traded the land my pit was on for a piece of land that Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge had, and Jim gave his son Bruce’s pit to me. The old pit was good, and the new one was outstanding.

I have no idea how many geese we killed from that pit. On a good weather day, rain, snow, fog, the six of us would limit out at four birds apiece by 8 or 8:30 a.m. Due to my flexible work schedule, I could go down there alone when the weather was nasty and kill four birds just standing up in the pit.

Then things began to change. We were seeing fewer Canada geese and more snow geese. The last year I hunted Snow Farm was 1988. I saw exactly six Canada geese pitch into our decoys. The only time you could kill snows was in a thick fog when they flew low enough to shoot.

The only Canada geese I see today are resident geese on golf courses and retention ponds. At least I still have my memories.