Wow! You had a better day than I did. Happy Thanksgiving indeed. I got to the river with a buddy at 5:00 AM so we could get in, get set up and be the first guys there. And we were - by a huge margin. We stood in the water among the reeds waiting for legal time and about 20 minutes before, some external anal sphincter paddles by in a canoe. We immediately turned on our headlamps and made our presence known by talking and looking in his direction. He saw us. But to our astonishment, he paddled only about 85 yards past us around a slight corner in the grass and starts setting up. (Welcome to public land hunting.) There were no other hunters further down river and plenty of room for all. All he had to do was go another 75 / 100 yards. So we yelled - "Hey - we're over here... you're too close!" Not a peep from him. He continued to clank and bang around - tossing a bunch of raggedy-ass decoys out, (during a kayak visit to him later, we discovered one of the decoys appeared to be a pterodactyl). And it gets better! Unbeknownst to us - because we could not see him through the tall grass - he sets up FACING our direction and the direction of the boat ramp! So there we are, standing in waders among the reeds along the opposite bank - hoping that he would be smart. Convincing ourselves that he had to have seen and heard us, and that he had to know where we were and not to shoot in our direction... (poor assumption by us.) At that time, we discussed that we now had only a few safe places where we could shoot, thanks to this idiot, but we'd see what the morning brought. Day breaks, distant birds are moving, we hear other hunters - hundreds of yards away shooting... they're having a good morning. Soon it's our turn. We see a pair of mallards winging by... they're up there but we hit them with the call and they turn, see our six decoy spread and start to cup... we're psyched... they're going to drop right in... suddenly Boom, Boom, Boom... 80+ yards over his head, our nitwit neighbor opens up and sky busts them - of course he misses, they're gone, and we're pissed. We yell... we get no response. A bit later... some geese come by... he gets out what I later determined to be a kazoo, and hits the most unworldly notes you have ever heard - gone. Later still, some low-flying ducks that we never saw must have been winging toward him - you guessed it... he opens up IN OUR DIRECTION! Now, we hear and see pellets whizzing through the reeds and branches and creating splashes across the river - also in the direction of the boat ramp! We yelled to him that he was shooting at us as a pair of ducks rose up from his direction and flew away, unscathed. That was it. We were done. We yelled again that he was shooting in an unsafe direction and that pellets were whizzing by. (The river is only 45 - 50 yds. wide in that spot.) As we climbed up onto the bank, I said to my buddy - "this has be a kid on his first duck hunt or something... gotta be right? He just doesn't know what he's doing and that shit's unsafe as hell. Somebody needs to give this kid a clue." We packed up at 7:45 - disgusted but while fetching the decoys, my buddy decided to pay him a visit in the kayak. While there, he reminded him of his unsafe distance, observed his unsafe set-up that was facing the wrong way, pointed out his unsafe tactics, his unethical skybusting, his discourteous and disrespectful positioning - which was too close - and then wished him happy thanksgiving." (I am paraphrasing.) And... it turns out it wasn't a kid! No, it was an obstinate old grey-beard who - by the looks of it - was nothing more than white trash. I heard him yell back to my buddy - "why don't you come over here?" which was ignored. We later found a game warden and reported how it all went down, told him he was still there and shared a photo of his plate and his truck. I'm a positive guy... I'm a live-and-let-live kinda guy, turn the other cheek, give the benefit of the doubt... but sometimes people just suck!
