I hunted in the morning with Mark Billings, Emily Billings, and David Breedlove. We slept in late because we knew that Winchester would be locked up in ice and we were correct. Since the woods were all locked up and some of our friends, Larry Otwell in particular, had already broken the ice up in the canal going to the south woods, all we had to do was follow the open water trail. It led to Larry and his group.

They invited us to join them and we jumped at the chance to do so. Ducks were flying the canal, coming from the adjoining one square mile reservoir of our's. Two groups of ducks had kept the reservoir open and had started flying this morning.

It was mostly Blue Bills and Wood Ducks flying, but there were some Mallards and Gadwalls sprinkled in the mix. I left about 11:30 a.m. to go to the airport and fly to Harrison to pick up Wes Wright. He and I got back to the motel just and the others came in for a late lunch. We all had some more potato soup donated by Mark's mom, Sue.

We went back out to hunt until dark and finished the day with 15 ducks, four Mallards, three Wood Ducks, one Gadwall, and seven Blue Bills.

More later,