This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun, One For Ducks…

We all make dumb mistakes. If we’re overly sensitive, we call them mental lapses. Our friends might call them boneheaded decisions.

We forget to put drain plugs in our boats before launching. We leave expensive rods at campsites. We lean shotguns against our cars and drive off after eating our lunch.

Sometimes we pay dearly for our blunders. Sometimes we luck out.

At midnight a few nights ago, a friend loaded his car with duck and goose decoys, cased gun and plenty of shells, hooked up his 16-foot boat and drove 140 miles to Ringold Springs on the Columbia River, launched the boat and, in the black of the night, ran upstream to a big island.

My friend, who for obvious reasons I won’t identify, left Spokane at midnight to get to the island so he would have a place to hunt. He knew other hunters would head for the island long before dawn.

He was lucky. He was the first to arrive at an excellent spot. It took him an hour to put out his decoys and rebuild a makeshift blind.

Then he settled down to wait for the 7:08 a.m. opening of shooting time. Finally, a few minutes before 7, he figured it was time to take his gun out of the case and get ready for some fast shooting.

As he slid the gun out of the case, he looked at it in horrified disbelief. The gun wasn’t his waterfowl gun. It was his 280-caliber rifle. In his haste the night before, he had grabbed the cased rifle, not his cased shotgun.

There he was, settled in his favorite blind on an island in the middle of the Columbia and armed only with a rifle, illegal to use on waterfowl.

A man who loves ducks, he decided to stay a while and enjoy seeing mallards landing among his decoys. Finally, about 10 o’clock, he picked up his decoys, returned to Ringold Springs and drove another 140 miles to his home.

Two hunting buddies of another friend made a dumb decision they’ll recall every time they hunt the Snake River. The men and my friend were hunting ducks and geese below Little Goose Dam.

The three shot a few ducks and geese early that morning and then the birds stopped flying. Sometime during the day, they hoped, a few birds might show up. They talked endlessly during the long hours. Finally, two of them decided to take a nap.

My friend sat quietly while his buddies slept. Then nature called. He left the blind carrying his shotgun and walked about a hundred yards.

“My pants were down when several geese saw our decoys and headed toward them,” he said later. “I knew I couldn’t make a loud noise that would alarm them, but I wanted to wake the guys. I whispered ‘geese, geese’ as loud as I figured I could without alarming the geese.

“The flock came in, set their wings and started to land. I stood up, my pants down, and shot twice. Two geese dropped into the water.”

The sleeping hunters, awakened by the shotgun blasts, leaped up. Too late. The rest of the flock veered away from the decoys and were gone before the befuddled hunters could lift their guns.

Those geese were the last birds the hunters saw that day.

Fishermen occasionally have mental lapses. Last June, while fishing a British Columbia lake where there are big, powerful Girard-strain rainbows, one of my friends laid his fly rod down for a moment. The fishing had been slow and no one had caught a fish for an hour or so.

But that moment was the one when an outsized rainbow ate my friend’s fly and jerked his $350 rod, $150 reel and $50 fly line out of the boat. My friend’s heart pounded as he watched the outfit vanish in deep water. For the next two to three hours, he and several other fly fishers fruitlessly tried to dredge up the rod and reel.

But my friend lucked out. The next day, another fly fisher, fishing across the lake from where the big trout took the fly, saw the line and retrieved the rod. The trout had broken off and one end of the floating line had floated to the surface.

He isn’t the only fly fisher who has seen rods vanish at that lake after big rainbows jerked them out of boats and float tubes. In June of 1904, another Spokane fly fisher got careless for a moment. He put his high-priced rod down and reached into his vest for a fly box. A big trout sucked in his caddisfly and, feeling the steel hook, raced off.

The shocked fly fisher watched his rod sail out of his boat. He, too, was lucky. Part of the floating line surfaced that afternoon and an angler in the area retrieved the rod and returned it.

But other fly fishers haven’t been as lucky. Several expensive rods and reels are at the bottom of the lake.

You’d think we’d learn. But we don’t.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Fenton Roskelley by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 3814.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fenton Roskelley The Spokesman-Review