Saskatchewan Smackdown

Now that everything has calmed down from my Canada trip I have finally got a chance to sit down and give everyone the results. Being that this was my first trip to hunt north of the border I was pretty much at the mercy of my buddies direction as to how the trip would be planned out and how the hunts would take place. And he was dead on. I was skeptical that we were headed 2600 miles away from home to a part of the world we were unfimilar with to hunt birds for a week with out a guide nor land to hunt them on. He assured me this would not be a problem.

After my flight from Baltimore to Kansas to meet up with the rest of the crew on Sept 27 we slept at a buddies house and headed out to Saskatchewan the next day. 24 hours of living in a Suburban on a road trip is not as fun as it may sound. We were all extatic to be making the journey and for the first 16 hours it was a piece of cake! We hit the Canadian border around 8am on Saturday morning. Our thoughts at this point was "alright, we are in Canada, almost there". Well 8 hours later we finally arrived at our location.

You can not hunt on Sundays in Canada, which worked out well for us. After a good nights sleep that didnt consist of a backseat bed and a seatbelt shoved in your back, we headed out at 7 am to scout the area for waterfowl. After finding tons of spots to hunt and speaking with 20+ farmers we recieved permission to hunt from all of them. We joked that we practically owned the entire area.

The rest of the week came and we hunted for 5 days straight and ended with a total of 240 birds. We harvested snows, blues, specks, canadas, mallards, gadwalls, teal (bw and gw), redheads, canvasbacks, shovlers, pintails, and widgeon. It absolutley was the best waterfowl hunting I have ever experienced.

The temps were very cool, and a few mornings even freezing (keep in mind this was the first week of October). There was plenty of water in the area and the birds were plentiful. The amount of Snow Geese in the area was overwhelming. And the duck hunting was world class. I highly recomend a trip to the area and if you go, trust me, you dont need a guide. The people are the nicest I have met and none of the locals hunt waterfowl. Everyone will allow you to hunt.

Cory Dukehart