Dablemont column: Breaking the drought in Louisiana

From one year to another, the things an outdoorsman depends on will change. Sometimes just a little, sometimes drastically. This spring for instance, the white bass run will be different entirely than it was last spring. Two years ago, one little tributary I have depended on for 20 years had no white bass spawn whatsoever. For the first time I can remember, the fish never came. 

I'll find them this spring, but the fishing will be a little different this coming year than ever before. It is the rule of nature; things stay the same season after season, but they always change. That only makes sense after you have spent a lifetime studying nature and the outdoors. Take mushrooms for instance.  One year you will find a place in the woods where there are dozens of them, and the next year, one or two, or none. You may find some this year where you never saw them before.

In the fall, the migration of wild ducks and geese is a certainty, but what they did last fall, where you found them and how they flew and fed and all that, will not be the same this next fall. I never saw more ducks ever, on any Ozark lake, than I saw on Truman Lake this past fall and early winter. Most of the time though, even with all those thousands of mallards, the hunting, at least the way we once did it with so much success, was entirely ineffective.

A river which harbored unbelievable numbers of ducks last January had only an average number of flocks this year. I remember when I was a boy, dad and I would float the Big Piney River where I grew up, in a johnboat with a blind attached to the bow and we found mallards and wood ducks aplenty. The Piney never has many ducks nowadays, but then, that was a time when Truman Lake and many of the state's waterfowl areas didn't exist. I remember one year, when I was about 14 or 15, when there were pintails and widgeons and gadwalls on the river for a couple of weeks. Species I had never seen before. But it only happened one year. I never saw but a handful of individuals of those species in any other year. 

I always feel a little cheated as I grow older because the duck season is shorter than it used to be. What I mean by that is, three months today has a lot fewer days in it than three months had when I was a boy. If that doesn't make any sense to you, you are probably too young to be reading this column written by a grizzled old outdoorsman.

If you are growing older, and live in a rural area of the Ozarks, you have noticed it. Whether it is morel mushrooms in the spring, tomatoes ripening in your garden, or crappie spawning...  a month has fewer days in it than it did when you were younger!

Since we love to hunt ducks so much, my good friend Rich Abdoler and I took a little trip in mid-=January to Louisiana to hunt waterfowl.

It came about when I talked to a young lady by the name of Megan Monsour Hartman, from the Louisiana Tourist Bureau, at a meeting of outdoor writers back in October. I told her I had never hunted or fished in Louisiana.  Megan set out to rectify that and scheduled me a hunting and fishing trip with a place known as Calcasieu Lodge near Lake Charles, which is about as far south as you can go.  Such places are usually way too expensive for people like me, although I have a few readers who can afford that kind of thing.  The Tourism Bureau paid most of the expenses, as I promised I would write a good story (with only the facts of course) about the trip for my magazine, the Lightnin' Ridge Outdoor Journal. I was hoping the facts would be that Rich and I got to fish for and catch some redfish and speckled trout, and kill some ducks.

I have no doubt it would have worked that way, but on the day we got there, driving down all the way from Arkansas in a pouring rain, south Louisiana got six and a half inches of rain. When you consider what a drought they had been having, with only 30 inches of rain in 15 months, six and a half inches in one day would tell you that Rich must be a Jonah, a genuine jinx of the highest order. There was way too much water to go out and catch any fish, and a wind that put three foot waves on Lake Calcasieu.

We did however, get to go duck hunting, and really enjoyed ourselves, although Rich wasn't shooting as good as he used to. That's something else I have noticed, all my hunting buddies, as they get older, are a little bit slower with the shotgun. Rich use to hit a lot more of what he shoots at than what he did in Louisiana. He would want me to point out that last September I went dove hunting with Rich and missed eleven straight doves while he killed seven or eight. Normally I only miss about 80 percent of the doves I shoot at! That ought to prove he's a jinx of some sort.

For both of us, there was a first as hunters. We both killed some speckled geese, also known as White-Fronted geese. They pass over the Ozarks in October by the thousands, in high wavering noisy formations, but seldom stop here.

Several are in my freezer now, and I have been told they are amongst the best tasting of migrating waterfowl.  The fellow who told us that was, a great young fellow there by the name of Steve Stroderd, who works at a refinery nearby part-time and guides hunters and fishermen the rest of the time. Steve was only about 30 years old, but an old hand at duck hunting. He had the best Labrador I have hunted with in many years. Her name was Lady, a four-year-old yellow Lab that was devoted to Steve. She was an example of what all duck hunters who own a young retriever hope to see eventually. I thought of my 9-month old Labrador, 'Lightnin' Ridge Bolt,' back home, knowing full well he never will be that effective and efficient.

There just aren't enough ducks in his future. Because of Steve's job, and the duck hunting he has there, with flocks of mallards and pintails and teal and gadwall and widgeon, Lady will just get better.  If you ever want to travel to Louisiana in the winter and experience some great duck hunting with a fine young man and a great dog, get in touch with Steve.

I like the duck-hunting part of Louisiana, but those cypress swamps and alligators and the Spanish moss all over is a different world. I didn't see any Cajuns, but we ate some Cajun food while we were there, thanks to Megan. It was a nice place to visit, and I hope some day to actually go back and catch a redfish, and write an article about that in my magazine and this column.  But the Tourism Bureau may have learned by now that as an outdoor writer, I am a little more like Rodney Dangerfield than Dean Martin, doggone it.  But a fellow who can end a drought with those kinds of results ought to get a little respect.

Check my website... www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com, or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net.  The mailing address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.