How Waterfowl Hunting Became My Everything

The Mud Runs Deeper Than Blood

The first thing you need to know about standing in freezing water before dawn is that it changes you.

Not in some poetic, metaphorical way. I mean it literally rewires something in your brain. The cold creeping through your waders, the sky shifting from black to purplish orange-pink, the sound of wings cutting through dead air—it becomes the baseline against which everything else in your life gets measured.

Most mornings, most people are still dreaming. I’m watching the world wake up with a shotgun in my hands and mud under my fingernails, and I’ve never felt more alive.

This is what obsession looks like.

 

 

The Inheritance

My dad didn’t teach me to love waterfowl hunting. That’s not how it works. You can’t manufacture need. You can’t force someone to crave something so deeply it becomes part of their cellular structure.

What he did was open the door.

He was a big game hunter through and through—the kind of man who’d spend years planning trips to chase elk across Montana, caribou in the far reaches of Canada, sheep in terrain that would break most people. I grew up on his stories. Late nights, him recounting hunts in the Northwest Territories with that look in his eyes that told me he was already gone, already back there in his mind. Those weren’t just stories. They were blueprints for the kind of man I wanted to become.

He’d take me with him to Montana and Wyoming where he had connections built over a lifetime. Guys he’d served with in the Air Force. Friends from Southern California he’d been hunting with for decades. Landowners he’d befriended and stayed in contact with year after year. These weren’t transactional relationships—they were earned through time, respect, and shared experiences. We’d hunt antelope mainly. Speed goats were among his favorite pursuits—plentiful, fast, and endlessly entertaining to chase across wide-open country. For a young boy learning what hunting meant, they were perfect. Fast enough to be challenging, abundant enough that failure wasn’t devastating, and exciting enough to keep me hooked. Through those hunts, I learned what it meant to hunt with purpose. To respect the animal. To earn it. To understand that the killing is just one small part of something much larger.

But then came the late 90’s and everything shifted.

He bought into a duck club in the Butte Sink, and for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time, something clicked. Maybe it was the chaos of it—the way ducks work, the split-second decisions, the controlled pandemonium when a flock commits and suddenly the world explodes into motion and sound. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was just my turn to find my own thing.

Those early seasons, it was mostly me, my dad, and Bill—his blind partner and a friend from church. They were friends before they ever became hunting partners. Bill’s wife and my mom were close, and it just made sense. They hadn’t hunted much together before, but sometimes things just work. And they were deadset on making that blind work. They had to be. As the new guys in the club, they got stuck with the shittiest blind. The one nobody wanted. The one that required twice the work for half the birds.

But they made it work anyway. Through sheer stubbornness and determination, they turned it into something semi-productive. I watched them build that unspoken communication from scratch—learning each other’s calls, figuring out when to shoot and when to let birds work, developing the kind of blind chemistry that looks effortless but isn’t.

Some mornings, we’d be joined by my grandfather Wayne and uncle Steven. Both were excellent hunters and sportsmen in their own right. Men who carried themselves with a quiet competence that only comes from a lifetime spent outdoors. On those special mornings when it was just the four of us—Jim, Wayne, Steven, and me—I was surrounded by the men I admired most.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was bliss. Pure bliss.

I remember the rhythm of those mornings. The silence that settles over a blind when you’re waiting, scanning the sky, listening for that distant sound of wings. But more than the silence, I remember the moments between—the shooting the shit, the jokes that got funnier with each retelling, the pranks they’d pull on each other, the stories of hunts from decades gone by that would make time disappear. My grandfather telling tales from his younger days, my uncle sharing some close call, my dad chiming in with his own version of events that never quite matched anyone else’s memory.

Then someone would spot birds. Everything changed in an instant. The energy shifted. Everyone moving without needing to speak, calling, reading the ducks, and in those fleeting seconds—those handful of moments when everything has to go exactly right—you understand why people spend their entire lives chasing this feeling.

That blind is where my foundation got poured. Not just taught—poured. Those men, that mud, that cold, those stories, those laughs—it all seeped into my bones and hardened there. Became part of my architecture. I didn’t know it then, but I was being built into someone who would need this. Who couldn’t live without it.

The Lost Years

Then I walked away from it.

Not because I wanted to. Life just pulled me in a different direction. My twenties became this blur of trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted, where I fit. You know how it goes. You get lost in the noise of becoming whoever you think you’re supposed to be. You chase things that don’t matter. You forget what does.

Hunting became a memory. A childhood thing. Something I used to do. Something that belonged to a version of myself I’d outgrown.

Except you don’t outgrow your foundation. You just forget it’s there.

But here’s the truth about obsessions: they don’t leave you. They wait. They sit dormant in your bones, biding their time, until something triggers them and they come roaring back fiercer than before. Stronger. Undeniable.

The Reckoning

One of my best friends, Evan, was the catalyst. Him and his grandfather, Don.

I had just left a job I was deeply unhappy with. That fall, I had time on my hands while I worked on lining up my next move. Evan and Don took me hunting. Every weekend, we’d head to Colusa. Those trips became my anchor during a period when everything else felt uncertain.

Evan took me waterfowl hunting again, and within minutes of being back in a blind, I knew. This wasn’t nostalgia. This wasn’t some sentimental trip down memory lane. This was recognition. Like running into someone you’d loved your entire life but had somehow forgotten existed.

The hook set deeper this time. Way deeper.

For years after that, it was the refuge grind. We coined the term “the looney lottery loop”—driving to each refuge in the Valley on Friday evening, dropping lottery numbers at every single one, then driving back that night after the draws came out to check each number. Hoping luck would pay off and get us a good spot for the morning shoot. It was exhausting. It was ridiculous. It was everything.

Suddenly I wasn’t just remembering why I loved this—I was understanding it on a completely different level. The preparation. The obsessive studying of weather patterns and migration reports. The gear tweaking. The constant mental chess game of trying to predict what birds will do and where they’ll be. The failures that sting and the victories that make you feel like you’ve cracked some universal code.

I was all in. Past the point of return.

That’s when I realized this wasn’t something I did. This was something I was.

Building Something Bigger

Hunt Bums came from that realization.

I started it because I needed an outlet for this obsession. A way to share what I was learning, document what I was experiencing, connect with other people who understood this pull. People who’d stand in freezing water at ungodly hours and call it a good morning. People who spoke this language.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much it would give back.

Through Hunt Bums, I’ve met people who’ve become some of my closest friends. People I’d never have crossed paths with otherwise. Total strangers from the internet who saw what I was building and said, “I’m in.” People who believed in the vision before there even was a vision.

I met Dru through another hunting endeavor I’d undertaken called Dabbler Supply—a project that had a short but fun run. Dru was a customer of Dabbler Supply and a believer in what I wanted to do with Hunt Bums from day one. Calling him a nice guy doesn’t even begin to describe Dru. He’s a good soul. Always willing and able to help with anything, and a genuine joy to be around. He’s a wealth of knowledge and one of my dearest friends—a firm pillar of Hunt Bums. Dru moved back home to Pennsylvania a few years back. I lost a hunting buddy, but I gained a brother who I chat with daily. He keeps me up to date on how much better PA is than California for just about everything—his words, not mine. Him and his wife Kara are as good as they come. People you’d be lucky to meet in any lifetime. I’m blessed I met them in this one and cherish the memories of the hunts we’ve had together. Now getting me out to PA for some East Coast duck hunting might be in the cards. Dru’s already working on it, I’m sure.

Jason and I met on a Facebook group where I was posting some Dabbler Supply updates and offered to do a gear giveaway to his group. We hit it off chatting through Messenger, and a few months later he flew out from Idaho on a business trip and came by for dinner. We’ve been like brothers ever since. He’s flown out to California to hunt with us multiple times, and I’ll never forget one trip in particular. All he wanted was a spoonie—literally the most plentiful bird there is in the Valley. The bird most hunters don’t even get excited about. But Jason wanted one, and we got him his spoonie on one of our first ups that morning. That made my day right there. It’s the little things that matter most. Jason’s committed to his family, his work, and waterfowling in equal measure. He’s the chapter president of Delta Waterfowl’s Treasure Valley chapter in Idaho and the owner of Ackley Outdoors. Whenever he’s in town or we’re in the same city for business, I know we’re in for a good time.

I met Matt through Facebook Marketplace of all places. I was selling a refuge cart and jet sled setup and had created this detailed post for it. Matt was the third or fourth guy to hit me up asking if it was still available. It had just sold, but we got to chatting and he asked what I do since the post was very “marketing style written.” I’m a marketer by trade, so I told him that, and he said, “Well I guess that makes sense LOL.” He was running an SEO company at the time, so we had common ground. We continued chatting over the course of a few days, which turned to weeks, which has now become years. Matt is a core component of Hunt Bums. He’s the guy I bounce ideas around with and sanity check our direction. He’s smart, committed, and talented beyond belief. But more than any of that, Matt is a good man. A God-fearing, dedicated family man in the truest sense. He might not know it, but seeing how much he loves his family and how dedicated he is to them has made me a better partner and father figure for my own. I owe a lot to Matt, whether he knows it or not. He’s also a chicharrón connoisseur and is always good for constant laughs—because even in the serious moments, Matt knows how to keep things light.

DJ is the youngster of the crew. Kid has so much heart and is so dedicated to duck hunting it’s mind-boggling. Matt picked him up a few years ago, took him under his wing, and showed him the way of the waterfowl hunting world. Seeing this guy progress in his hunting has been one of the greatest joys for me. He’s got a great eye for content and is willing to give hunting everything he’s got and leave it all out there.

These guys are now integral parts of this team. This journey. They’re the people I trust in the blind, the ones I call when I find birds, the people who get it without me having to explain. We were strangers once. Now they’re family.

That’s the thing about this pursuit—it creates bonds that transcend normal friendship. When you share the suffering, the early mornings, the frozen fingers, the moment when everything comes together and a flock drops into the decoys exactly like you planned—that creates something permanent.

Hunt Bums became the vehicle for all of it. The passion, the learning, the community. It’s not a brand. It’s a reflection of why any of us do this in the first place.

Why This Matters

Here’s what I’ve learned: waterfowl hunting is the most honest thing I do.

There’s no faking it out there. The birds don’t care about your gear or your Instagram following or how many hunts you’ve been on. They either commit or they don’t. You either make the shot or you don’t. You’re either good enough or you’re not.

That brutal honesty is addictive.

Every hunt is a test. Every season is a chance to get better. And you never—ever—master it. There’s always something new to learn, some variable you didn’t account for, some way the birds surprise you and humble you and remind you that you’re just a guest in their world.

But more than that, it’s about connection. To the natural world. To the people beside you in the blind. To something bigger than yourself.

It’s about carrying forward what my dad Jim, grandfather Wayne, and uncle Steven started. What Evan and Don reignited. What Dru, Jason, Matt, and DJ help me build every single day. About honoring those early mornings in the Butte Sink and those Friday night lottery loops by creating new mornings, new memories, new traditions. It’s about passing this obsession to new generations of hunters who’ll feel what I felt—and maybe, if I do this right, feel it even deeper.

It’s about building a community of people who understand that standing in freezing water before dawn isn’t crazy—it’s necessary.

The Point of All This

Waterfowl hunting didn’t just become my passion. It became my compass. My purpose. The thing that makes sense when nothing else does.

It’s why I started Hunt Bums. It’s why I keep pushing, keep learning, keep showing up in the dark when the weather’s terrible and the odds are against us.

Because out there, in the mud and the cold and those fleeting moments between flights, I’ve found something most people spend their entire lives searching for: A reason to wake up.

See you out there.