Let’s say you have a hunting trip booked and you get a last minute call telling you to change your plans, due to weather conditions. While weather can play havoc on almost any type of hunt, it can shut you out on a duck hunt. In fact, this just happened with our service and it wasn’t the first time we’ve run in to the problem.
At best it would be an understatement to say; weather is un-predictable. I’m sure numerous meteorologists would disagree with that statement, but I feel certain a lot of people, especially the outdoors crowd, would agree me. It seems like no matter how hard the weather teams try, they miss on a lot of their extended forecast. With access to the Internet we all have the ability to monitor local weather stations, The Weather Channel and NOAA, but who’s forecast do you believe and for how long of a period do you want to trust it?
This past week our local TV station was calling for single digits at night and low twenties for the daily highs. The Weather Channel (TWC), for the first part of the week, was calling for upper teens, with highs below freezing. That’s quite a difference in temperatures, for the same area, but either prediction would produce cold enough weather to freeze up a shallow rice field and that’s the point I want to focus on. For the past two weeks, we’ve cancelled all our hunts.
Yes, we do have deeper water in our flooded timber and yes; we’ve even been holding reasonably good numbers of ducks in two of the deeper locations. Nevertheless, you have to be able to hunt them. Holding the birds doesn’t do our hunters any good, if they can’t get to the location where the birds are.
Our recent problems hit us from two different areas, both the results of extremely low, possibly record-breaking temperatures. As mentioned, most flooded rice fields are shallow. Water depth will range from a couple of inches deep, to no more than a foot of water at the deepest point in most rice fields. While mid to lower twenties can create short-term problems with ice in the shallow fields. Add in a couple of days with lows in the teens and daytime highs only reaching the mid twenties and you can expect the fields to be frozen solid. I’m talking solid, as in no water … all ice! Those same temperatures will ice up the edges of the deeper water in our flooded timber. So much so that you cannot break through the ice with our boats, making the open water inaccessible.
We’ve tried running boats up on the ice and breaking out a path to the deeper water. We’ve even tried using a sledgehammer, to break open a boat run, hoping for access to open water, but in our situation … it just doesn’t work. As far as the shallow rice fields go, we’ve stretched out miles and miles of rolled, flexible plastic pipe, called Poly-Pipe. With the quarter to half-mile runs of Poly-Pipe in place, from our wellheads to the area near our buried pits, we’ve fired up the diesel engines. The water coming out of the ground will usually be around 56 degrees Fahrenheit. While 56 degrees doesn’t sound very warm, it will keep a big hole thawed in extreme icing conditions. In fact, depending on what speed you are pumping and the diameter of the well, it’s not uncommon to be able to keep open an acre or two around the pit, but does it work? The most honest answer would be, seldom. In fact, I remember one year, 12 to 15 years ago, when it worked and it worked well, but that was the exception. So what did we do? We called our clients that were scheduled to come in and talked them in to moving their hunts, rolling over their deposits to reserve hunt times for the next year, or canceling all together.
Some had plane tickets booked and some had already purchased their license. In at least one case the state allowed a group to use new dates on their trip license, but those with plane tickets were forced to pay a penalty. Penalty or not, I think I’d rather pay the airlines an extra hundred bucks and use my ticket later, in lieu of flying in to a frozen tundra, where the odds of having a quality hunt were stacked against me.
Over the years we’ve tied to make it our policy to offer clients an option to cancel hunts, if weather conditions here were that extreme. While such a last minute phone call shocks some of them, most do listen when we call. There’s been a few times when a client’s comments stuck in my mind, like the time a group of un-guided hunters had booked with us for their first time. The weather had slipped in on us. It was no more than a day or two before the group was scheduled to arrive and I called them. I told them what it looked like and how hard the freeze was going to be and recommended they push their hunt back to another available opening. After a brief discussion, the guy heading up the group said; “I’ll call the others and get back with you.” Later that afternoon he called back and asked Jackie (my wife/boss) why we were canceling their group. She explained the situation again and told them we would be more than willing to take their money, but honesty was a hard policy to beat. They moved their hunt dates and have been regular clients for six to eight years now.
As corny as it might seem, the Golden Rule is hard to beat. As an outfitter, if we cancel hunts our lease prices don’t go down, the utility companies don’t give us a discount and even worse, those are days that cannot be sold at a later date. In fact, when you think about how short a duck season is, then factor in the cost of canceling hunts and you’ll start to understand why we try to get clients to move their hunts to another date. Nevertheless, if it means changing your schedule, loosing the cost of a trip license, or paying a cancellation fee for an airline ticket … When Your Outfitter Calls … listen to what they tell you and be thankful your dealing with folks who want to treat you, like they would want to be treated!
Charles “HammerTime” Snapp
www.arkansaswaterfowl.com snapp1@sbcglobal.net
