WWA Young Shots flighting Pinkfoot with Hy-Fly
We met Mark at Milnthorpe square at 3pm on Sunday and travelled to Hy-Fly at Pilling for an evening flight for duck and pinks. On arrival, we split up into two groups. Me and Mattie Wright went with Mike and Will. Luke went with Leroy and Mark. Me and Mattie jumped into the back of Will’s Land Rover, who then drove us along the sea wall for about 5 minutes. After parking up we set out on foot for about another 10 minutes across the marsh until we got to the wide channel that Mike and Will said was a good spot as the ducks fly up and down from the marsh to the sanctuary behind us on the other side for the sea wall. We split up and me and Mike got down into a channel and got dug in. Mattie and Will got into a channel about 100 yards in front of us and we waited for the ducks. Then the howling wind and heavy rain and hail stones started, and every time I looked up I got hail stones in my eyes. There were a lot of duck flying around us but not over us so we packed up and moved position to try and get under them. We all had a few shots and ended up with 3 mallard between us and then we could start to hear the geese starting to fly so we packed up to head to an inland splash where the geese were hopefully landing. When I was packing up and emptied the cartridges out of my gun I noticed the bolt was sticking and not sliding on my semi auto. We packed up and got back to the Land Rover and drove back to Mikes pick up and we took my gun apart and tried to see what was wrong and gave it a wipe it down and it was still sticking. We worked out it must be something in the trigger but we had nothing to knock the pin out to get my trigger. Typical I have shot over 5000 cartridges with the gun and only ever had about 3 jams and have never had any problems with it. I took the trigger out when I got home and it turned out to be a bit of wheat or something that was in the trigger. It must have come out of the Land Rover on my glove and when I was pushing my cartridges in my gun in I guess it got in. Luckily Mark had a spare gun so Will ran out onto the marsh and got it off him .Thanks Will and Mark for letting me use your gun. Will got back with Marks gun and we could hear the geese flying so we rushed out and walked across 3 fields to get to the splash and sat down and tried to get some cover against a barbed wire fence about 20 yards apart so that the geese would fly over us going into the splash. We had to keep still as there was no cover to hide behind. We waited about 10 minutes and we could hear the geese getting closer and closer and then we could just start to see their silhouette against the clouds getting bigger and bigger and then they were over us. We all had a shot and I think 4 dropped from the sky; the one that Mattie shot landed a couple of feet next to me with a big thud. Then a skein of geese started coming in and it all happened again and again. We were only shooting at skeins of less than 10 bids so that we did not scare the geese out of the area & any skein bigger than 10 we let fly over us. There were lots of good shots and geese kept falling out of sky. Then at 8.15pm we packed up; the total bag for between us for the night was 3 mallard and 14 pinkfoot. I got 2 geese and a shared mallard with Mike. Luke had his first pinks and first pintail also. I had a great time. A big thank you to everyone at Hy-Fly for giving us a fantastic opportunity to shoot with them and to Mark for organising it and letting me borrow your gun when mine broke.
Thanks again,
Matt Burrow
