Duck Hunting at Empire Lodge

Port O’Conner, Texas---Hunt Dates: Jan 17-19, 2015

The Wide Open Camera crew went again to Port O’Connor to make a TV show with the Empire Lodge team. This time, their sights were on Duck Hunting the bay waters from airboats. Too cool!!

We were set to meet up with Wayne Timmerman, our guide, and his friends, Kyle Nethery and Trey Hensel. We packed up the camera gear, hooked up with my buddy Tim Teal, and made sure Tony DeHoyos was on board as our main camera-man.  We were looking to make an awesome duck hunting show. Funny how things work out, but Tim has become one of our camera-men. He loves videoing his deer and exotics on his ranch, and on this hunt, he was both a shooter of ducks with his 12 gauge automatic and camera-man 2 for the episode.

Wayne told us that the weather had been quite “Ducky” over the last few weeks -- That means grey skies, drizzly, and cold. Just how the ducks like it. 

When we got there we had a big weather change -- not always a good thing. We had a blue bird day with the Mercury in the low 60’s. Ouch. Would it hurt the hunting? Time would tell.

We made several hunts and seemed to get all conditions; we hunted morning and evening, kinda like whitetail hunting.  We were on the way to the boat ramp with the airboat in tow at 5:30am, and we were back at the Empire Lodge at 10:30 for Brunch. We would then head out at 2pm for an afternoon hunt. It was outrageous! We had an amazing young chocolate lab, Remy, to fetch our birds.

The decoy spread was the best I’ve ever seen. They left an alleyway open in front of us and separated the ducks by species. We had some serious groups fly over, and we had many small groups come in and land in the decoys. Too cool. Seeing ducks fly in and open their wings to decelerate and stop by skidding on their bellies right in front of us was outrageous. Sometimes we would just let them fly in and land to capture the cool video of it. The Empire Team has it figured out. We made an outstanding TV show that will air later this year on KSAT, Channel 12 on Saturday morning on the Early Morning Outdoor Segment from 5:30am to 6am.

The skies were thick with Red Heads since they were the dominate ducks for this time of year. We had mainly Redheads but we also had Pintails, Widgeon, Green Wing Teal, Scaup and even the elusive Blue Wing Teal. The hunting was fantastic. Wayne was amazing on the Duck Calls, and we made some great memories of the fantastic eating and billiards and shuffle board at the Lodge.
   
Our plans are to come back to fish the bay system for Redfish and Trout with Empire next, and in the summertime of 2015, we'll go after its Marlin and Swardfishing at night.

Contact the Team at Empire Lodge for your next Corporate or Private Adventure (1-361-571-5071). You'll make lasting memories that you will want to re-create year after year. That’s the experience with the Wide Open Crew. You know we will be back again and again.

I’ll see you in a Wide Open Outdoor Adventure.  --Dave