End of duck season a good time for reflection

For me, the end of duck season is a time of remembrance and reflection on the sporting year just passed.

It starts with two duck hunts to end the 2021-22 season. One was at the legendary Greenbriar Club, where Bobby Martin, Keith Allison, Sam Speer, Steve Ferguson, and I bagged limits of mallards in flooded timber with 28-gauge shotguns.

The other was at Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area with artist Bob Snider of Roland. We didn't fire a shot.

Bill Eldridge, Ed Kubler, Rusty Pruitt, Dick Phelan and I also welcomed the new year with a characteristically great trout fishing trip on the White River at White River Resort. I caught a 28-inch brown trout at the bottom of snow-clad Marion County mountains.

February 2022 found us hunting rabbits in Prairie County with Bob Rogers of Maumelle, Hollis Foster of Holly Grove and Matt Gladis of Hazen.

In March we broke bread, sipped a little bourbon and flexed fly rods with the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club in San Francisco. We also hunted pheasants with Kat Anderson and David Anderson in the Sonoma Valley at the prestigious Wing & Barrel Ranch.

Spring arrived with a fishing trip with Snider and Jim Tom Bell at Forty-Acre Lake. It had been a yin-yang kind of day for Snider, who began that morning with two unsuccessful attempts to acquire caffeine. He won our little fishing tournament. On the way home we stopped at Craig's in DeValls Bluff. Bell ordered something like 30 sandwiches, but he wouldn't share with Snider.

April ended with a waterfall safari around the Ozarks and the year's first float trip on the Buffalo National River.

I did not kill a turkey in 2022, but I killed a ton of them in my book, "St. Tom's Cathedral, A Turkey Hunter's Quest for His Best," which was published at the dawn of turkey season.

The BFL All-American visited Hot Springs in June, enabling me to interview some of America's best anglers. We also traveled to Table Rock Lake to fish for smallmouth bass with Mike Boyles, a fishing guide and longtime friend. Another trip north took Eldridge, Pruitt, Kubler and me to a smallmouth bass fishing trip on Crooked Creek.

The weather got hot in July, forcing Pruitt and me to seek solace chasing smallmouth bass on the Caddo River.

July brought more fishing, including a bass fishing trip to eastern Pulaski County with Joe Volpe of Little Rock. We ended the month near Lake City, Col., fishing for trout on the South Fork of the Gunnison River with Greg Graham of Little Rock. One superlative day of fishing ended with a torrential storm on the way back to Graham's house. The rain and sleet triggered mudslides that would have trapped us if not for Graham's vintage Ford Bronco.

Imagine looking straight up a mountain taller than any in Arkansas and seeing rivers of mud and rock plummeting to the road. We went through seven of those. We were the last vehicle through them all before the deluge engulfed and closed the highway for about 14 hours.

In August began a weekly routine of shooting sporting clays with Joe Volpe, Anne Marie Doramus and a rotating cast of extras. We got pretty good with practice.

September took us to Cimarron County, Oklahoma for a once-in-a-lifetime antelope hunt. Having drawn a doe-only tag, I spent the entire hunt around trophy bucks. For two days I glassed one doe that would not leave a small patch of private property that the owner denied me permission to hunt.

The pace picked up in October with my first visit to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's shooting range in Mayflower. I also participated in the first Shoot For a Cure sporting clays tournament at Remington Gun Club with Rusty Pruitt, Trey Reid and Randy Zellers.

At a media conference in Branson, Mo., I teamed up for another bass outing on Table Rock Lake with Mike Boyles. I celebrated my birthday fishing for bass with Volpe, followed by a trip with Pruitt to the Little Red River.

November treated us to a superb specklebelly goose hunt near Carlisle with Volpe, Sean Tobin, Anne Marie Doramus and some friends from Oklahoma.

We ended the year with an annual Christmastime duck hunt at Hampton's Reservoir near Stuttgart and our annual deer hunt with Bobby McGehee of Little Rock and Jason Shipp of Henley.

The best part of it all was sharing the stories with you, our readers.

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