This past weekend I decided to take on a challenge. I had called one of my good friends, my go to guy for marsh hen hunting, on Friday to make plans for the 6.2 high tide on Saturday morning. His name will remain anonymous as I would hate to embarrass him with these next comments. He relayed to me that he would not be able to hunt the next morning because he was going to pick out tile and paint for a bathroom remodeling project at his house. What guy in his right mind misses the first weekend of marsh hen hunting to look at paint chips and tile samples? Doesn’t he realize it really does not matter his opinion is on either; surely by know he must know his wife will just pick out what she wants no matter what he says? I tried a couple of other friends to see if they were interested but everyone else already had made other plans by this time.
I was really eager to go and decided I would give it a shot by myself; well not exactly by myself, I decided to take along my Golden Retriever Remington. Remington is always chomping at the bit to get in the boat and I figured it would be a great opportunity to see how he did retrieving marsh hens without the distractions of someone else in the boat.
So challenge number one would be how to pole the boat and keep the gun within reach and be ready to shoot when the birds jumped up. The balance of the challenges all revolved around Remington. I adopted Remington from a Golden Retriever rescue group two years ago after my long time companion Rusty, an exceptional Golden Retriever, passed away at the rifled old age of 15. Remington a two year old puppy when I adopted him has been living in Rusty’s shadow since day one. While he is a great dog and a good retriever, even at the age of four he is still a rather excitable puppy that has quite a bid of difficulty listening when there are any type of distractions around.
Typically when Remington gets in the boat he is very excited and paces side to side and forward and aft for a least a half an hour until he gains some compo