Big-River Divers

    A January moon a night from full is settling toward Virginia’s shore when I traipse down the Potomac River’s Maryland bank to the dock at the bottom of Capt. Bob Wetherald’s backyard. Under lights Bob winches down two camouflaged hunting boats to reach an abnormally low tide. This beauteous moon is pulling the river out while a wind from the north is urging it downstream toward Chesapeake Bay, and that is what Bob must get down in the near-freezing water and do, too, pushing and pulling two boats reluctant to leave their cradles. He’s joined there by photographer Scott Moody and Scott’s hunting buddy, Kurt Zulauf—both of whom, like me, live on the Maryland shores of Chesapeake Bay—and a television cameraman or two. Clad in boots instead of waders, I can only bide my time on the elevated dock, feeling less than useful but dry.
    Absent is Joe Coogan, who will shoot with us the next day. Joe and I became fast friends in Africa many years ago, and now he is the brand marketing manager for Benelli shotguns and sort of my boss in this endeavor of filming the TV show “Benelli On Assignment.”
    Bob climbs in over the stern of his boat after I lower myself precariously through empty air, steadying one foot on his shoulder so as not to start the morning with an ice-cold dunking. Joining us are Scott, videographer Steve Panciera and Bob’s yellow Lab, Teddy. We drift out onto a river lit only by the moon’s low, waning rays signing a silver scribble from off toward Virginia’s silhouetted coastline. In the second boat are Kurt and videographer Dan Larsen. Teddy paces excitedly, trodding on toes sensitized by chill inside my rubber boots on the coldest morning of the winter thus far. He gains a little extra height by planting a hind foot atop mine to stand nearly upright and peer over the camouflage siding at birdy noises he’s hearing.
    Even our human ears can hear them—low squawks and grunts, splashings and plashings of takeoffs and landings, and the fast, whistling wingbeats of fat-bodied birds passing at high speed over our heads. Behind us the eastern sky over southern Maryland holds just the slightest promise of dawn, and the black river before us is alive with ducks.
    Generally speaking, I don’t hear a lot of people announce that they’re off to Washington, D.C., for the great duck hunting. The Potomac River conjures a more stately and historic frame of reference, especially this stretch we’re on, practically in the shadow of the Washington Monument, maybe 20 miles upstream from us. Just up the shore from Bob’s house is a hamlet called Washington’s Crossing. The Father of Our Country was born and raised on the Virginia side right across from here, and I’d be willing to bet he bagged his share of ducks and geese more or less where Bob, Scott and Kurt are wading in mid-river open-water shallows a half-mile up from Bob’s dock. They’re spreading strings of decoys below a slight hook of the shore—beside a towering power plant—that creates a sandbar where diving ducks and sea ducks come to feed.
    The first flower of Virginia and Maryland aristocracies lined these banks with grand plantations when the Potomac was their domestic main street and the Chesapeake their highway to the world for tobacco riches that built the great manors. Colonial squires hunted these shores with beautiful and ornate flintlock fowling pieces, likely as not silver-inlaid and crafted in England, and a few of those planters played outsize roles in the insurrection that led to our nation forcibly separating itself from the aforementioned kingdom. When I get a chance on a break ashore to explore a wild-looking and uninhabited island, traces of an old manor house are discernible amid non-native trees and cultivated bushes that could only have been planted long ago by hand.
    We’re better armed than those gentlemen sportsmen of yore, carrying Benelli semi-automatic 12-gauges crafted with this kind of shooting in mind: for large, tough birds often taken at some distance. I’ll start the day firing Federal 3" Magnum Black Cloud loads with No. 2 shot. Maximum range and impact are good things to have on this hunt, because I’ll be shooting at birds that Bob tells me will be farther away than I think they are, flying faster than they appear to be, and of a constitution and chunky build that can make them incredibly hard to kill.

    Our bird of choice might be a goldeneye or a bluebill, as scaup are called hereabouts, and that’s what first comes wafting picture-perfectly upwind into the decoys: a bluebill drake with wings cupped like full pockets. He drops gratifyingly as Scott and I both fire. We’re politely deferential as to who killed the bird. Scott is of a largeness to be an impressive companion under any circumstances. In fact he’s a quiet, agreeable man of mild demeanor. He develops a harder focus, though, when he sees a photograph he wants, and he’s willing to go to extremes for first-class photography or great hunting, both of which matter to him. Born and raised in Havre de Grace, Maryland, where the Susquehanna River debouches into the upper Chesapeake, creating flats that are among its hunting and fishing glories, Scott gets a lot of practice at both. He and Kurt have been known to don “body boots,” immerse themselves to their armpits in open water, and use floating cutouts of swans and geese as screens in order to get great gunning and authentic closeup photography.
    Two old-squaw land beyond the decoys and paddle in amongst them. “That’s what they do,” Bob whispers. “Old-squaw will land outside the spread and swim to you. Scoters and bluebills, they come right in. With divers, the ones that go by, they’re going by. The ones that cup their wings, they’re coming. Your puddle ducks will spin you, circle, think about it and then leave. But once a diver makes that circle back, he’s coming in. OK, let’s take these!” We stand and stop both old-squaw on the rise.
In pursuit of a bird that’s down but diving, Teddy the Lab’s head disappears, and then briefly his whole body. He surfaces with the duck in his jaws.
    “Teddy went under and dug out that bird!” Bob exclaims, with rightful admiration. “He spotted it underwater and swam down and grabbed it!” This, the science writer in me suggests, may be how whales descended from wolflike terrestrial predators prowling shallow ancient shores.
    There’s little calling involved in drawing the birds we’re after—that would include old-squaw, eiders and two kinds of scoters—sea and white-winged—among the sea ducks, with greater and lesser scaup, goldeneyes, buffleheads and ruddy ducks constituting our divers. Canvasbacks and other species are out here, too, but not in season. They’re all birds of open water, where the only solid objects floating on the cold, gray winter surface of a bay, sound or river are likely to be themselves and their kind. So they’re drawn to motion and visual signals—first and foremost, for our purposes, by Bob’s large and artful spread of decoys. I was astounded the first time I saw an experienced hunter on the Bay stand up and wave a flag and a flock of eiders in purposeful flight hundreds of yards away turn at a right angle and come straight to us.
    Now a flight of five bluebills arrives with wings set, sailing on a high-speed glide into the decoys before anyone sees them. “In front. Take ’em!” Bob cries, and all three of us jump up and fire, a trifle hastily. One duck stays behind. It’s not mine.
Some of the ducks coming to us have a disconcerting habit of flying in front of where I shoot. It’s an old and common iniquity in wingshooters who don’t swing nearly as often as once they may have on live targets that are trying earnestly to elude their best efforts. It’s especially apparent with old-squaw, eiders and scoters, which like to hug the water, flying low and fast and leaving my shot patterns trailing after them.
    “An old-squaw can be flying 45 miles an hour,” Bob consoles me. His best advice is to lead farther than seems reasonable. Birds at the edge of our spread, he points out, are close to the edge of reliable shooting range, 30 to 40 yards. This isn’t easy shooting, he says, any more than wading around on a sandbar to set decoys before daylight in the middle of a big river’s fast and freezing current is an easy way to hunt.
    “Anybody can shoot puddle ducks,” Scott says. “But it takes a certain type to hunt divers. It’s cold, and you’re out in rocking boats. The birds are fast, you look up and suddenly they’re coming into the decoys. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
    Some of the ducks we shoot get back up after being hit hard and pinwheeling into the water like shattered kamikazes, with none of the semi-control of a broken-winged mallard steering in for a crash landing. Birds that have no right to ever lift their heads again do so this morning, and some fly away, heedless of repeated rounds lashed across their low, swimming profiles in an attempt to put them down, or hurled after them as vainly as epithets when against all reason and natural laws they take to the air.
    With their stout bodies, thick feathers and dense bones, these birds were built to dive and stay underwater, and Bob’s still amazed at their ability to absorb shot. “That’s why I shoot these 31/2" shells,” he says, holding up a round suggestive of a cigar. “Candlesticks, I call ’em.”
    So when you’re hunting open-water ducks on the wide tidal reaches of the Potomac, the lesson is, as Robert Ruark might have put it: “Use enough gun!” (or in this case enough shell).

    The following morning Joe Coogan is with us, and I feel it’s time to start firing candlesticks.
    “Next one’s yours,” Bob tells me. I smile inside when an old-squaw drake hurtles from right to left directly over our decoys and packs on afterburner speed when I stand. I swing through the bird and in front of him and keep swinging farther, stretching out my lead until the duck’s at 11 o’clock and streaking downrange when I pull the trigger without breaking my swing. The duck folds his wings and drops the white blaze of his head as gracefully as if he’d decided to pray, performing a half-tumble before hitting the water shoulders-first and going so fast that he skips.
    An involuntary gasp of admiration breaks forth from my companions. Or maybe it’s amazement that I connected. No matter. I can feel the rightness of that swing, squeezing the trigger at that moment when you know, not think, the bird’s days are done.
    But a downed sea scoter swimming among the decoys shakes its head and scoffs at four loads from the world’s heaviest 12-gauge shell and still flies away.
    “Damn, those scoters are tough!” Joe exclaims, to the general amusement of hunters and cameramen who’ve been watching them rise from the dead, Lazarus-like, for two mornings. A collection of oddly shaped duck calls dangles from Joe’s neck, rather like an African witch doctor’s bony necklace of magic unspeakables. Joe didn’t know that his calling skills would cast no spells on these ducks. For a time he guided water-fowlers in the fabled flooded timber of the Arkansas Delta, but this tidewater-river hunting is as new to him—a recent fellow Maryland resident after a roaming life—as it is to me.
    I bring up with Bob the delicate subject of recipes for the ducks we’re shooting. Sea ducks, we both know, can pose an epicurean and ethical problem, with their sometimes disagreeably fishy taste. “I eat what I shoot,” Bob says. Most of the divers here taste fine, he tells me, so long as they’ve been feeding on their favorite food—the sea lettuce that grows year-round in the Potomac’s underwater pastures—more than on shellfish. “I marinate the breasts in Italian dressing and then grill them on the rare side.”
    “I’ve eaten a lot of duck medium-rare that tasted like steak,” Joe concurs.
    Bob also harries the powerful and succulent rockfish, as striped bass are called hereabouts, during the eight months it’s legal around the Chesapeake. A couple of those months overlap with fall waterfowl seasons. So I have lots of good reasons to sign up with Bob’s Mid River Guide Service in the near future and hunt and fish a river I once commuted across most weekdays. At that time I lived and worked near its banks, sometimes marveling at its beauty, often oblivious to its charms.  Now I find myself taking in the Potomac with the keenness and exhilaration of beholding the familiar anew, framed in unexpected freshness and invitation to adventure, perceiving America’s venerable founding river for the first time in a lengthening lifetime through a hunter’s eye.

Author’s Note: For more information on hunting and fishing the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, contact Mid River Guide Service, 301-399-9374; www.midriverguideservice.com. To watch “Benelli on Assignment” check local listings for the Versus channel (www.Versus.com) or visit www.benelli tv.com.

Doug Lee is a writer and filmmaker who lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He served his apprenticeship and early professional career with National Geographic magazine, and more recently he has contributed to a range of nature and outdoor sporting magazines; edited and written books; and written, filmed and produced TV and video programs.