Roads were good, plenty of new birds but they did not want to be where we were. Saw flocks of wood ducks (between 20 and 30) and plenty of mallards . We ended up with two wood ducks and 3 mallard.

Shot a limit of...wait for it...wigeon, greys, and teal. Other than the occasional jack, that's all I've shot this season. 75% of my birds this year have been wigeon.

I went hunting

Sorry, couldn't resist. Thought of this with your post.

Did you ever get him out of bed or did you guys just spoon all morning?

No, he stayed warm next the boobie all morning. Only thing that got cold this morning was my fingers on the boat ride, it was a glorious morning to be on the water. Hot coffee never tastes so good.

Was it locked up on the lake?

I hunted last Wed, Thu, and Fri. Good hunts all days in different spots. Had kid crud to attend this morning, will be out tomorrow tho...

My afternoon hunt was not great. Might be going in the morning.

It's too early to be doing this

Best hunt of the season today, 22 minute two man limit... mostly mallards with a couple GWT and couple of greys. Thank you frozen up ponds!

I drove around after our hunt yesterday and every single hole was frozen up. You'd think that would've made it easy for us since we were about the only game in town, but they were still VERY picky. We got our birds, but only a couple of groups decoyed nicely. The rest were shot passing/flaring. We used very few decoys, but no wind and creeping ice made it tough to keep things looking natural.

Santa Clause brought me one of those Motion Ducks deals - basically a jerk rig on steroids. First time I used it was a pain, I had to move too much to get them to swim right. This time I hooked both spreaders up to the jerk rig and it worked a LOT better. We had them decoying into it perfectly. I don't pitch products, but this thing is my new favorite toy.

I'll have to look into that. The issue we had was the lack of wind to keep the water moving. It would skim up with ice in 10-15minutes and it kept creeping. Made it difficult to keep the decoys in open water. Everything was so iced up and the sun was so bright, everything was so shiny. The decoys, all the broken ice (it froze so clearly that it looked like window glass), everything. It probably looked like a there were disco balls everywhere. If I were a duck, I wouldn't want to land in that crap. What saved the hunt was the fact that they wanted to be in there so badly. They'd work and start to decoy and then flare off at the last minute, so we just shot them on the flare. The 2 groups that DID decoy nicely would have landed in our laps. Maybe a Motion Duck like you're talking about would keep the water moving enough.