Do you feel you have better success in setting up in either an open water part of a lake, or a back marsh/flooded creek? The open water is more catching them in flight from their roost to their food source. The marsh seems to be the areas they might be feeding, the “x”. Only have access to public hunting lakes, rivers in east Texas. I know I need to scout more, but with only a very limited amount of time to hunt, I get it in where I can. I have been trying to scout while hunting new places, well it’s all new since this is my first year. Didn’t want to waste time looking at open water if it’s not very productive option. Also, very few of the back creeks are on public land, many are private.

Divers off main lake points in open water. Puddlers in the marsh, and by that I mean anything shallow with groceries (aquatic vegetation or flooded grasses).

Stupid question alert, but the marsh can just be the shallow bank area/flat correct?

I will always pick a backwater with feed over anything else. There is NOTHING better than a small intimate back water slough or marsh. The ducks get in real tight. It is rare you would find me with a big open water set up. I have been known to set up on a backwater slough, on a river, where it is literally 3 feet wide off a main river channel and only 8" deep. The ducks flat out ate it up for weeks and shot mallard after mallard doing this growing up.

Depends.... If there is slack water that is holding any kind of vegetation, it would be good to watch because birds will feed up in that. Recently hunted a pocket persay that was off deep open water. Was only 4" deep but the vegetation was perfect. Also, pay attention to wind, that seed blows to one side of the pocket and these birds know that. Sometimes doesn't always work out to have birds landing perfect for the hunt, but you aint pulling the trigger if you aren't where they want to be.

We scouted lake today. NW wind. Divers on north end, puddle ducks in marsh shallow area on the south. Little north wind tomorrow, we will set up on south end

Was tough decoying Mallards, there were more of those than anything. Main problem was small window- they would pop up over the blind going away (North) but still in my opinion- hunting the X, regardless of wind is the best thing to do. I set the spread for neutral wind, instead of for north wind with a pocket between dekes and blind. I did shrink the spread from 3 dozen late to 1 dozen and added bubblers.