Ducks Unlimited Podcast

00:00 John Gordon Hello everybody and welcome again to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host, John Gordon. Got a special guest today. He's a guy that I've gotten to know recently. We filmed DU Nation with him down there on the Texas coast out of Matagorda in Port O'Connor. It's an episode that'll be coming up soon. He's one of the most fanatical fishermen I think I've ever been around. And that's hard for me to say because I've been chasing fish my whole life pretty much. But he's a young guy down there and a very interesting character. Zach Shannon, welcome to the DU podcast. Thanks for having me, John. Man, I just started thinking about this today. I was talking about fanatical fishermen. We went fishing on Saturday evening until dark after you had been fishing that morning. Just got in the night before from Cincinnati. Had already taken a party out. He had to be up at three o'clock the next morning to go offshore. So it was like, man, this guy really loves to catch

00:56 Zack Shannon fish. It's hard to catch him sitting on the couch. We've had some wicked weather this year. When the windows are there to get out there on the water, I'm on it. We were out there this morning. I got to work this evening. I'll be out tomorrow morning. Got to work tomorrow evening. It's just the weather's been so rough this year that we haven't had a whole lot of time where it's looking out and we got great weather. We got great conditions. We got a great noon, great tide. If it looks like it's worth fishing at all, we've been going this year pretty

01:29 John Gordon hard. Man, this is a cool place to fish. That's all I know. It's very diverse from just the bay flat stuff to the surf to offshore. The Texas coast has got pretty much everything you'd want

01:43 Zack Shannon in a fishery, as far as I can tell. Yeah, it's great. My trip Saturday morning, we were catching redfish. Me and you went out Saturday evening catching trout. Sunday morning, I was offshore catching snapper. We had a bunch of mahi up in the boat. I think we caught about six or seven. We had a 70, 80 pound wahoo free swimming next to the boat. Couldn't get him to eat anything. Then this morning, I was out running for tarpon in the surf. It's a little more work than a lot of other places to get that much variety, but it's here. You just got to want to get after it. I got you, man. I got you. Okay. I want to go back in time to young Zach Shannon growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio. How'd you get started hunting and fishing at that point? My dad loved to hunt and fish. My dad was a big outside guy. We grew up catfishing in the rivers and we had these big pay lakes back home. It's injured feed to come in and fish for 12 hours and you could sit around. There was different ways to fish it. Catfishing and you can throw it out and let it sit on the bottom. That was never really me. We would do bump trolling all day on the lakes. We'd find structure. We'd go out with just big egg weights and drag the bottom looking for snags and looking for rock piles or looking for holes. We'd memorize where those holes were and we'd go out. We'd bump troll big live baits over those, over whatever structure difference in the bottom that we found catching big catfish. I loved to bass fish. I grew up watching fishing on TV shows. The first time I got a hold of the salt water, I was like, man, there's a reason they film fishing shows in the salt water and not in the freshwater lakes in Ohio. But I grew up, my dad loved to deer hunt. I don't like hunting when it's negative five degrees outside and there's a foot of snow in my lap. That wasn't really for me. Then the deer hunt side, there's no moving. We don't hunt out of big box blinds back home. We don't hunt over feeders. It kind of burned me out a little bit on the deer hunting. I did a little bit of bird hunting back home growing up. We'd float the river, shooting geese out of the river, come around a bend and there'd be a pocket of geese sitting in the flats and they'd bump up. We'd shoot a lot of Canadians like that and shot a few ducks. Then you move down here and you get a taste of what it's like down here. It really rekindles that fire for getting after it again because it's just so much better and so much more diversity than I ever grew up

04:07 John Gordon with. Right, right. Yeah, that Texas coast area, especially waterfowl hunting, you never know what you might be able to see down there. It never surprises me what ends up in the bag. But folks listening to this podcast, I'm going to talk about with Zach next, is that Zach's a former Stark Allegiant baseball player, professional baseball player. When did you know that baseball

04:33 Zack Shannon was going to be a huge part of your life? How old were you? If you talk to my parents, they'll tell you that I said I was going to be a professional baseball player when I was about six years old. That's at least what I said apparently. First time I remember realizing that I was a little different and had some really good abilities. When I was about 12, 13 years old, I kind of realized that I wasn't really playing with my friends anymore because it wasn't fun. I didn't enjoy it. I had to start traveling and getting away from it. Luckily, the baseball world in Cincinnati is very, very good in itself. So I didn't have to go too, too far. But yeah, I was probably 12 or 13 years old and then just kind of started playing up and started traveling a lot more and just never slowed down. What I wanted to do, just like now, I know I want to

05:21 John Gordon hunt and fish every day back then. I wanted to play baseball every day. That's right. That's right. And the first time I ever heard your name, the name Zach Shannon, was out of the mouth of a mutual friend of ours, Uncle Jay Burchfield. Uncle Jay. Uncle Jay is a fanatical Delta State baseball fan. Zach played at Delta State in Cleveland, Mississippi. How did you get down

05:42 Zack Shannon to Delta State from Cincinnati? Well, I went two years of junior college. I wasn't really the best student and didn't actually have the grades to end up going to a D1 college out of JuCo. Thought I was going to get drafted. Never went. Was a stupid 19-year-old athlete and a very persistent coach by the name of Coach Steven Wagner at Delta State just would not leave me alone. The dude literally called me six times a day for six months and they ended up getting me down there on a visit. And I just was like, man, got to get down south and start playing again, get in front of these scouts. And I can't pass up an opportunity and ended up coming down. And kind of really fell in love with the small town life. I am from Cincinnati, but I grew up originally in a smaller town off the east side of Cincinnati. Moved a little bit more in towards the city later on in the high school. But when I came down to Mississippi, I just kind of fell in love with that small town, good baseball program. Just everybody, the biggest concern is baseball. And that's kind of how I ended

06:45 John Gordon up falling in there. It's interesting. Mississippi is a very small state. Obviously, Mississippi takes his college baseball extremely seriously. Between them, you look at 2021 national champion, Mississippi state, 22 Ole Miss. Southern Mississippi is very much in the mix. And then you played in the D2

07:02 Zack Shannon World Series at Delta State. Yes, sir. Yeah, I actually went on a visit to state my sophomore year at a Wabash as well. So I knew all about how serious collegiate baseball was in Mississippi.

07:15 John Gordon Had to be a big transition though at the Mississippi Delta. It's a very different place. And the people, we were talking about this here the day, man. There's no greater place with

07:24 Zack Shannon characters in the world than the Delta. Yeah. You can almost say it was a culture shock. First time when I really moved down there. I'm Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm from the north. I moved down there and it's a whole other lifestyle. Everything moves a little slower and people are more concerned about a little bit different things. And I think that's really, really what made me absolutely

07:48 John Gordon fall in love with it so fast moving down there and being down there. I got you. I got you. I mean, once again, for the listeners, I'm going to give some a few stats because the state of Mississippi has produced a lot of power hitters and some very famous ones, Will Clark and Rafael Palmeiro, just to name a couple, but they don't hold the single season home run record of Mississippi. Zach Shannon does at 31. In a season where you hit 406 with 93 RBIs, a Golden Spikes award semi-finalist, the first one in D2 baseball history. Man. So the stage was set for you to be drafted and become a

08:24 Zack Shannon pro. Yeah. The ball looked like a beach ball the whole year. You hear guys talk about the ball just looks big right now or the ball looks like a tic-tac right now. And I remember that whole season. I don't, I don't ever remember coming in from an at bat and feeling like I shouldn't have hit a home run or I shouldn't have whacked the crap out of it. And, you know, it was a crazy feeling to feel that for a whole season. You know, I'd felt that before, you know, maybe not for 50 plus games. You know, I'd felt it for a 10, 15 game stretch where you're just absolutely on fire and then it kind of fades and then it comes back. But down there is the, the first year was kind of the same way. I can't remember exactly what it was my first year, but, you know, I felt I was hot the whole year, never, never really cooled off and then came back in the second year and just got even hotter and never cooled off. Yeah. It was, it was a lot of fun, man. It was, it was a lot of

09:16 John Gordon fun. Well, and that leads to, you know, you're, you're being drafted by the Diamondbacks, correct? It was a Diamondbacks organization. I know you were playing in Montana and well, as often happens with athletes, man, you had some setbacks and it spun your whole, your life in a different direction.

09:32 Zack Shannon Yeah. You know, I played good my first two years and, you know, I was just on pace to do what I needed to do. And, you know, COVID hit, I had a thumb issue my first year, a knee issue my second year, a knee issue during COVID and then coming out of COVID, getting ready for spring training. I was invited to the big league spring training and, you know, two weeks before I report, I blew my Achilles out. And that, that one, that one really hurt, ended up getting released from that before spring training started, you know, had all the aspirations to resign and, and continue my baseball career and just push through the rehab and just fight the adversity. And I would say probably two, two and a half months into my rehab process, I pushed up off the table and my shoulder gave way. So I laid on rotator cuff, AC joint, laying there with my foot in the cast, trying to recover from an Achilles surgery with a blown out shoulder. And, you know, that was, that was pretty much the final straw for me. I was looking at a two and a half, three year recovery after coming off an empty COVID season. You know, that to me was just a, it was a hard pill to swallow, but just realizing, you know, like, Hey man, I'm going to be 24, 25 years old, not playing for three years. I'm not, I'm not going to have a good chance of getting resigned. So I stepped away from the game and had some good friends down here. You know, pretty much tell me, Hey man, you know, quit being a sorry POS and get up off your butt and contribute to society and make something of your life and move down here. And I moved down here a little over right around three and a half years ago. And

11:02 John Gordon just haven't looked back. That Texas coastal area is, is unique to me because it's not like, it's not like Florida or even like Orange Beach, Alabama area where, where, you know, the beach life is really a big deal. What's, what's big down there is hunting and fishing. Yeah. It's an entire culture builds around it that people down there, man, are just hardcore

11:22 Zack Shannon and you fit right into that mold. Yeah. Yeah. You can't, you can't find someone that doesn't do some sort of hunting or some sort of fishing down there. You know, it may not be the ducks. It may not be the red fish. It may not be the trout, you know, but, but there's, they're doing some form of fishing or hunting. I would say probably 99% of the people down here, you know, and like you said, it is, it is a huge way of life down here. And it's, it's just, it's crazy to see, you know, you walk around and, you know, we were, we were kind of talking about the other day, trying to find some, you know, find some new land, find some new right, duck lease land. And, you know, it's, it's impossible, you know, there's a waiting list to find lease land down here. And, you know, they, they're just crazy about it. And that, you know, it's, it kind of fuels your fire when, when you're just kind of getting into it and really figuring it out. And, you know, you go out in the morning and opening day duck season, you get to the ramp and there's 45, 50 mud boats out there. Everybody's partying, getting ready for opening day. And, you know, it's, it kind of fuels

12:17 John Gordon that fire and makes you really, really fall in love with it. Yeah, that's right. And Texas is one of those states that is what I think the stats are like 97 or 98% privately held, but you've got an

12:28 Zack Shannon entire world down there offshore in the bays. That's totally public hunting. And, you know, the South shoreline and East and West Matagorda Bay, you know, they're, they're, they're technically privately owned, but for years and years and years and years, they've just let people hunt them. It's all title. It's all, it's all marshland. You know, they run, they run cattle on it, but on the outside edge, the cattle don't get it in any ways. And it's kind of turned into public hunting. And, you know, we've got thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of refuge laying down here that hold unbelievable amounts of birds. You know, it's, it's, it's pretty cool, you know, being in this area on the coast, on the water. And, you know, like you said, it's, it's very privately owned the state of Texas, but, you know, being able to jump in the boat and go find a point on the shoreline that, you know, has been having ducks fly by or, you know, go find a pocket, go find a little back pond. And, you know, that's a great thing to have is all that

13:24 John Gordon title water that gives you access to hunt all that. Right, right. And you, and you go up and down the coast, you know, you're right there in the Matagorda area, the east and west Matagorda Bay, as you go farther south, the Aransas Bay area, Rockport, you know, Port Aransas and all that. I mean, you've got a lot of folks hunting down there as well. It's the redhead gets a lot of, of play down there, you know, and rightfully so there's huge rafts of redheads that winter on the Texas coast, but you're liable to run into anything down there in my experience. And a lot of puddle ducks, especially teal, Wigeon, Pentail, they love those, that Texas coastal area.

14:02 Zack Shannon Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, I found that later in the season, you know, there's when we really started seeing our puddle ducks on the south shoreline early in the season, we tend to hunt, try to hunt a north if we can. But, you know, that, that second split from, you know, from end of December through the end of the season, you know, I don't even shoot redheads, you know, we see thousands of them. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing like, you know, first light, you know, you got a group of 2000 redheads buzzing you and, you know, you get, you get real antsy trying to pull the trigger on them. And, you know, we were patient and, you know, we wait for those midday Pentail flights. I don't know what it is down here. Those Pentail like to fly at 10, 30, 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock sometimes. And, you know, they get up high with that sun and stare down at you. And, you know, it makes it tough, but, you know, we get, we get groups of two, three hundred Pentail coming through and, you know, it's, it's great. I mean, it's, it's awesome. That's a, it's a, it's a little bit more work being down there, but, you know, it's, it's awesome. You know, you get the, the diversity is, is out of this world. You know, you, we've been talking about that. You could, you could go out with a group of five guys and shoot 12 different species of ducks. You know, there's not a whole lot of other places in the world that you can do that. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And then of course, in the wintertime too, the fishing doesn't end. You can still catch fish. So the whole cast and blast is a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's one of the best, you know, you get out, you get early duck on in, they work well, they do what they're supposed to do. You get finished, you know, hour, hour and a half in and, you know, you get back to the boat, pick up the decoys, grab a little sandwich and, you know, we'll go bump over to a little flat and go throw top water

15:39 John Gordon corkies for big trout. Exactly. So it, it never ends. Cause you think about the weather down there. It's very rare. It happens, but it's very rare that it's ever really that cold. I mean, a lot of times you're dealing with really, really nice temperatures in the, the forties, maybe you start out, but it's in the fifties, sixties pretty quickly. So you don't have to freeze to death either to get

15:59 Zack Shannon on some great action. Yeah. We had, we had some cold days last year. We get a, we, we usually get a little stretch of, of about two weeks that it's, it's pretty ridiculous. You know, we were breaking ice last year on one of our little ponds and dogs had icicles hanging from them. You know, we, you know, we, we've had, we have days like that, but yeah, most, most of the time, you know, what's very mild weather for, you know, the, the duck hunting world. Don't get me wrong. And I think that's why I really, really enjoy it a whole lot more. You know, there's, there's not a whole lot of times that we're getting up at, you know, and it's five degrees outside. It's, it's very mild weather. I don't even hunt with a jacket until usually to split. The neoprene waders get worn

16:38 John Gordon probably two or three times a season. So it's, it's very nice. You know, up here in this part of the world, Arkansas, Missouri, West Tennessee, if it's not cold, you're not going to have much success. I live it down there. It could be like 60 degrees and you got, you've got birds flying

16:53 Zack Shannon everywhere. Yeah, that's great. You know, this is where they come and, you know, they go a little further south, you know, this, but this is, this is a stopping point. So, you know, as long as it gets nice and cold up there, it can be as hot as it wants down here. You know, we still have those

17:05 John Gordon birds. Right, right. And as an organization, Ducks Unlimited has spent a lot of time down there with the, with Texas Parks and Wildlife and the, and the Prairie, and the Texas Prairie Wetlands Project, working with private landowners, developing habitat. I just had Todd Steele from the Thunderbird Club on the podcast and we did a film with him while we were down there. Actually, right after we filmed with you, we filmed with Todd about developing habitat on the Texas coast. So you've got a lot of folks who are really working hard to improve that area and really make sure that those

17:35 Zack Shannon birds have a great place to winter. Yeah, I mean, it's, we've talked about it. You know, I'd love that, you know, everybody down here that duck hunts and burning goose hunts and crane hunts, you know, everybody'd love to see, you know, some of the rice come back and, you know, have a whole lot more rice. But, you know, there is a whole lot of, a lot of projects and stuff going on where people are trying to, you know, rebuild a little bit of that habitat. And, you know, I think the Parks and Wildlife do do a great job, you know, with our refuges, keeping them, keeping them as big and as, as blocked off as they are, you know, gives us birds a safe spot to be, gives those birds, you know, a place to rest. And one thing people forget about, you know, is 2000 miles south of where people start shooting at them. So by the time those birds get down here, you know, they've seen every goofball, you know, between Canada and, you know, North Texas shooting at them. And they get fairly educated, you know, and having a place for those birds to rest up on those refuges and up in those, up in those place, like, you know, talking about the Thunderbird Club, you know,

18:34 John Gordon you know, it's a great place for those birds to rest up and, you know, get a little dumber for us. Exactly, exactly. That's one thing those guys do, and a lot of guys on the coast, they've tried to manage their pressure pretty well to where, like I said, those birds have seen it all by the time they get down there. Yeah, seen it, every, every chick in the book, they've seen it by the time they get here. That's the challenge of being a Southern hunter. And I've always thought that the Southern hunters are better hunters. Yeah, I'm biased, of course, I've been doing them

18:58 Zack Shannon all my life that way, but I always felt that that's the case. Yeah, I'd like to think so, you know, it's, it's, it's different, you know, and, and, you know, I'm really excited. We've been talking about trying to go up North this year and I got a, I got a friend of mine that, he's got some stuff up, up in Oklahoma doing big mallard hunts. You know, just totally different, you know, down here is, is you can be as rewarded as the work you want to put in, you know, and, and you can, and you can do your lazy hunts and, and it works and you can put your work in and it works, you know, and especially hunting, hunting the salt, like I do, you know, I love hunting that marsh, I love hunting that open tidal water, love hunting the bay, you know, if you want to, if you want to, you know, put the boots on and put a little bit of work in, man, it's, it makes for some really epic hunts. You know, it's, it's something really cool, you know, like, you know, the diversity, I mean, you know, you could be, you know, we, we do some, we do some stumps sometimes that, that, you know, make us debate, you know, on whether or not it's

19:54 John Gordon worth it. Hold that thought. And we're going to, we're going to take a little break folks. We're going to come back and we're going to discuss some of the real challenges of hunting that type of terrain and also how rewarding it can be. So coming up next on the D podcast. Welcome back everybody. The DU podcast, we're talking with captain Zach Shannon from the Matagorda Bay, Texas area. We were talking about, like you said, putting some boots on the ground and some, and some of the difficulties you've got to face on the coastal area and the public land

20:47 Zack Shannon hunting down there. What do you, what do you think the biggest challenge is in Texas coastal hunting? Mud and you know, it's the winter low water. This is airboat country down here. Airboats are great, but airboats allowed, you know, and I've seen it plenty, you know, that, you know, guys rolling in airboats and next thing you know, it sounds like, you know, you got a million ducks over your head at four o'clock in the morning and you know, there goes all your birds for the rest of the day. They push them all out and then it turns into a, well, we're going fishing for a little bit because it's going to be an evening hunt. You know, really the biggest challenges is we get super low waters and it's just, it's happened to stomp, you know, we've got some places that we've got 20 yard walks that are amazing, but they get pressure and then they've got some places that are seven, 800, 900, thousand yard stomps, there's knee deep mud. Those place don't get any pressure and the birds are there, but you know, you're talking about a 45 minute to an hour walk through the dang mud at three o'clock in the morning. And that's tough. That's tough. That makes for a long, long day, man. It's pretty cool too. You know, like, like those birds aren't pressured. Those birds are doing what they need to do. Those birds come in, they'll work you for a second. And, and you know, typically if your spreads right and your hides good, you know, you don't have any issues. You know, I can't tell you how many countless amount of times I've been Bayside, you know, hunting a more easier access spot and everything's right. Everything's good. The birds want to work and the pen tail sit there for 20 minutes and do freaking circles over your head, like turkey vultures. And here comes a group of widget up underneath them and they look down at you and they just keep, you know, it's, it's, it's all about pressure and it's all about getting away from the pressure. We love, I love the weekdays, you know, getting away from everybody and, you know, having the whole Bay to yourself makes a big difference. Raph size makes a big difference. You know, early season, we don't hunt with a bunch of decoys, but you know, come second half, you know, we're, we're taking every decoy that we got, you know, 15 to 20 dozen and hunting huge rafts and we'll spread out, you know, 50 yards apart and hold little pockets and hold little hooks for those birds to come land into. And, you know, whether they pick and choose which one they want to come into, you know, we've, we've got most of our bases covered, but you know, it's just, it's different. It's a big learning curves, um, coming down here and doing it down here. And I've had some great friends that grew up down here that have kind of, you know, helped me through it and, you know, kind of like the fish and stuff, like we don't miss it. I don't, I don't think I miss more than five or six days all last duck season. Um, you know, you spend that much time out there on them and you know, you kind of figure their ways out a little bit, but really, you know, really the biggest, biggest difficulty down here is the, is the pressure and the low water. Um, you know, just, it takes away so much your access, you know, we, we, we were standing on the shoreline the other day fishing. We were four or 500 yards off the shoreline and then knee deep water still, you know, so come winter time when we lose another foot of water, foot and a half of water, you know, you got to walk that to get to your duck holes. Pretty skinny. Yeah. It's, it's the boat doesn't go in there. Um, this year we're trying to, trying to get it set up. Um, we're trying to get a, a little crew circled out together with a couple of airboats, um, couple of mud boats either, we're going to taxi everybody out in the Bay boat and the mud boat or the airboat will be sitting there waiting on that skinnier stuff. And we're going to push our, push our way in on that.

24:01 John Gordon And we're going to try doing it that way this year. Gotcha. That's a great point that that winter time water level is, is very low compared to the summer and where you, you know, like I said, we were out way steep water the other day and you go back there in December and that water is

24:14 Zack Shannon going to be what six inches maybe. Yeah. Maybe, maybe depending on, depending on, you know, certain spots, but yeah, um, you know, I've seen it plenty, um, you know, guys stuck and you know, it's, it's, I'm not going to say I haven't been, um, you know, I'm not going to say I haven't hit a couple of sand bars, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's wild, you know, you get out there and, and the water just so much lower in the marks that you had in the summertime, they just mean absolutely nothing out there in the winter. You know, you find that's, that's how you find your new oyster reefs to fish in the summertime. You go out there and, you know, your water's about two feet lower than what it was in June and July when you're out there. And, you know, you see oyster reefs sticking up out of the water and you're like, well, I didn't even have any idea that was there. So, you know, you know, it's a great way to find your

24:56 John Gordon new fishing spots, but, but yeah, man, it's that low water makes it really tough. It was a good point you brought up a second ago about, about decoy spreads down there because it's almost like a reversal that it is up here. A lot of folks start up here with big, really big spreads and they might start pulling decoys and using smaller stuff as the season goes on and try to give it, you know, a different look to the spread. Cause I think that, you know, that's, that's huge, it's critical to success having a different look than everybody else. So you've got to go big down

25:24 Zack Shannon there the later it gets. Yeah. You know, those birds get, those birds get rafted up and they get in big groups and, you know, it's easy to go out with, you know, when we do it, don't get me wrong. We do it and you know, we, we kill birds and, but you know, come, come into, you know, the second split, man, it's, it's, it's hard to go out there with a dozen or two dozen decoys or three, three dozen or five dozen. I mean, you know, you want to go out there with everything that you have. And it, and even then it still might not be enough. You know, it, it, you know, and the big, the big thing is, is, is our redhead numbers out in the Bay, they get, they get so high and everything else sees them and they want to go land with them. The widget and the pen tail, the teal, the bubble. I mean, every, everything wants to go land with them because they know they're safe. You know, and it's really hard to compete with 5,000 redheads rafted up and the cove next to you. It's really hard to compete with that. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the, the decore numbers

26:17 John Gordon go through the roof towards the end of the year. Yeah. That's a really good point. The, the redhead numbers have to be seen to be believed. I think sometimes people don't re they've never seen rafts of redheads that big and numbering in the thousands and thousands in any place that they've seen it been to before in the past and you go out there and the birds get up and it's just like, this is like what it must've looked like back in the 1800s and a lot of places where the birds

26:42 Zack Shannon are blackening the sky. Yeah. That's really cool. I had some kids last year. We run these big kids camps down here and last year was the first time we ever took them on a Bay hunt. And, you know, of course, fantastic weather, you know, 30 mile an hour, north wind, just huffing and puffing its butt off. And, you know, I told these kids, I'm like, Hey, these birds are going to be flying with the wind today. They're going to be going fast, lead them by a school bus. And, you know, right when the first, first light popped up, you know, we had a group of seven, 800 redheads come flying over our head and, you know, you know, of course young kids never seen that before, you know, they didn't shoot a single bird, you know, it is, it's how it goes sometimes. And, you know, but they all looked at me like we've never seen that many birds fly at once in our life. And I'm like, well, it's how it is out here, you know, and the weekends are tough, but the weekends are great. You know, I like the weekends that I like to hunt are high sun, warmer weekends. And it's the Bay boats, everybody out there fishing keeps those birds up. You know, you look out and you'll see a boat going, going out, going fishing. And, you know, you're like, that means it's time for you to sit down and get ready because we're going to drive through a raft of birds at some point, they're going to push them up. And, you know, you look out and that Bay is going to cross the water. And next thing you know, there's five to 10,000 birds up in the air. You know, it's wild seeing

27:57 John Gordon those huge rafts of birds out there. There's another aspect I want to talk about real quick down there. I know I'm a big dog guy, you're a big dog guy. You have to be careful in those Bay systems a lot because of dogs feet and the fact that those oyster shells can cut one to ribbon.

28:14 Zack Shannon So talk about how you really have to work around that. Yeah, you know, I went through my first year with my dog. She got cut up pretty good. I was down for probably two or three weeks, you know, got stitched up and there's a learning lesson. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's tough. There's a lot of oysters everywhere. You know, those oysters, you know, they hold a lot of bacteria and you know, I can kill your dog. It's about finding that right point. You know, maybe the ducks want to be here, but man, we can't, I mean, I can't take my dog there. So if we're going to hunt there, it's, we're not having a dog and we're going to pick up the birds or we can try to hunt 500 yards this way and try to traffic the birds in and we could, you know, we can, we can use the dogs and we can run the dogs here. But man, it's, it's tough, you know, being out there and being in situations that, you know, we can't really bring the dogs. Yeah, it's, it's tough. You know, you got to be real careful with the oysters and the dogs. And, and, you know, sometimes it's unavoidable. Sometimes you don't even know they're there until you're picking up your decoys and you're like, oh man, that there's a patch of oyster shells and my dog probably ran over 10 times today. And, you know, it's, it's, you know, constantly checking their feet. I mean, I, you know, my, my goofball won't ever even let me know that she's hurt or something got her. You know, she's, she's as birdie as it gets. But you know, about every two or three retrieves, you know, I'm picking her up and checking her feet out, just making sure that everything she's running through

29:37 John Gordon is not cutting her out too bad. Very good point. Very good point. Sometimes you just can't run a dog in some of those spots where the birds are. Yeah. I don't like those spots, but sometimes you got to haunt them. Me either, man. Me either. I hate it. It's a, it's a good point though. We don't ever think about it here in Arkansas or something. You don't worry about the dog's feet. Yeah. You know, they're never going to run anything but mud. And so it's really, it's easier because you can always pretty much hunt your dog, but it's, it's a good point on the Texas coast that you've really got to be careful with your animal. Let's talk a little bit. You were talking about youth camps. I know you're heavily involved with kids, both in a hunting and fishing setting

30:12 Zack Shannon and also you're teaching kids how to hit a baseball. Yeah. So we've got, there's a great little group down here, Hooksbitt Junior Angler Association, and they put on about five or six kids camps a year, 20 to 30 something kids come in for a whole week. They come in like Sunday for lunch and they stay through Thursday night. They take a guided boat out Monday through Thursday. They do skeet shooting. They've got a really awesome bass pond. They take kids bass fishing in Monday through Wednesday is like a, you know, just to have fun and go catch fish. And then Thursday, they run a tournament. They pay out for biggest stringers and biggest redfish, biggest trout. It's really about getting the kids really involved in the outdoors. And it's a great little deal that they got going on. And then last year we did a hunting camp. We did a goose hunt with them. We did a crane hunt with them. We did a duck hunt with them. It was a whole lot of fun, man. It's a whole new experience, you know, taking the kids out and I know you've got four different kids on your boat every single day teaching them how to hunt and fish. And, you know, it's a whole lot of fun. I really fallen in love with doing it. And then, yeah, I've got my facility here in town. Yeah, I think I've got 50 or 60 kids that I do all the baseball stuff with as well in the evenings.

31:30 John Gordon So yeah, guys like you, helping those kids really learn the experience and get involved in the outdoors, you know, from a Ducks Unlimited standpoint, we've really always been about it from the green wings to the varsity programs in high school to the university programs into adults,

31:47 Zack Shannon really bringing those kids along. So that's a great thing you're doing there. Yeah, I love it. I mean, it's great. You know, I never really grew up inside and, you know, the whole time I was inside was the winter, you know, but in the summertime and in the spring and in the fall, I was always outside and couldn't never stand sitting inside doing nothing or sitting inside watching TV when I could be outside fishing, when I could be outside shooting, when I could be outside just doing something. And I really enjoy, you know, that they put these big camps on for these kids and, you know, they can kind of really like, hey, guys, there's like, look at what we have right here. This is what you can do besides sitting at home and doing nothing.

32:26 John Gordon You know, you just got to get off your butt and go do it. Too many video games being played these days, stuff like that. You just got to get outside and enjoy it. And there's such a bounty down there on the Texas coast to enjoy that it's really, really great. Let's talk a minute about how long it takes you really to learn the ropes about what you were doing down there as a captain on the water. Because it's challenging. You talk about the shallow water in the bay, especially you can get yourself in real

32:54 Zack Shannon trouble. Yeah, you can get yourself in a bind real quick. Man, really, when I first came down here, I was super paranoid, you know, all the time. You know, and this is before I was guiding. This is when I just had moved down here and was kind of finding my ways and doing everything. And I spent a lot of time on the water, spent every dollar I made on gas, filling the boat up. And I'd just go get in the boat and I'd go drive the boat around. And I wouldn't come in until I bumped into a couple of things a couple of times or, you know, I ran, it was running out of gas. And that was, you know, I really spent a whole lot of time finding out an area. And, you know, I'd pick a two or three square mile radius and I'd go out there and I'd just do circles over it all day long. And I'd find the shallow spots and I'd find the shell. And, you know, you got Google Maps and GPS and everything. And, you know, I'd live on that. I stare at it and I'm like, hey, there's a reef here. There's a flat here. I need to go look at it. I need to go figure out how to get through it. I need to figure out where to fish it. It was, it took a long, long time. And, you know, there's still, I still have, you know, there's still certain parts of the bay, you know, it's ever changing. You know, the reefs are always moving. The flats are always changing. The guts are always changing their depths. And, you know, it's still, it's still, you'll learn every day when you're out

34:04 John Gordon there on it. Yeah. It's easy to just get out on a lake where the water's eight, 10 feet deep and roll around. People don't realize, man, you're talking about knee deep water. Even you're in

34:14 Zack Shannon the middle of a giant bay and it's, you know, only a few feet deep. Yeah. I've, you know, a lot of my people, customers, I've kind of explained to them, like they keep asking me, you know, about the bay and like, man, I think that the deepest part of East Matagorda Bay is like six feet deep. Right. You know, I mean, I've never seen seven foot, you know, and, you know, I've got waiting customers and we'll go out and we'll go weight fishing and I'll stop in the middle of the bay. And they're looking at me and I'm dropping the power pole down and it's a foot and a half deep, foot and a half deep and we're two and a half miles from the shoreline in either direction. And, you know, it's, they're like, I would have never guessed that this was right here. And, you know, and it falls off. Those reefs fall off into deep water, but, but yeah, man, it's, it's, it's a very, very shallow bay system that, you know, you get out there halfheartedly and,

34:59 John Gordon you know, you can get yourself in a bind pretty good. Yeah. But that's why there's so many ducks there as well. Right. Those ducks are hitting that shallow saltwater big time because it's only a few

35:08 Zack Shannon feet deep and they get, they've got all kinds of grasses that they're feeding on grass. We've got a ton of bait that all those divers like to feed on and, you know, it doesn't get rough. You know, that's the thing with the deeper water gets rough or shallower water. It does get rough. Don't get me wrong. We've had our rough days, but, you know, it stays a lot calmer, you know, being, being that it's shallower, white caps faster, but, you know, the waves never get nearly as big. And originally I thought that, you know, those birds don't want to be in white caps and having waves passing over them. And I can't tell you how many times I've seen a raft of birds 300 yards off the shoreline, just having rollers smashing over top of them, you know, that I, they don't seem to care too much. You know, in your brain, you're like, man, those birds don't want to be in that. Man, they are, they're in it. And they're out there rummaging. They're out there on those flats eating. They're out there, you know, they're just doing their thing. And, you know, they like to loaf in the middle of the bay and, and, you know, it's, it's safe. It's a, it's a shallower bay system that doesn't get tore up. It gets muddy, it gets nasty, but, you know, there's never, never three, four foot waves breaking out in the middle of the bay. You know, there are always little rollers and, you know, one to two footers most of the time. And, you know, and those are, those are nasty days. And, you know, those birds, they just don't seem to care about it.

36:24 John Gordon Don't seem to bother them too much. Exactly. And birds are so adaptable. They can adapt to different conditions that, that would bother a lot of other birds. Ducks just don't seem to, to care about that. You know, we talked about guns and gun selection down there that you really shouldn't come down to the bay with your 28 gauge and expect to have a lot of success that you need

36:46 Zack Shannon to come armed. Yeah. You're going to have a tough time. And I've had guys do it and we've, they've shot birds and, you know, we're shooting far. A lot of the times, you know, a lot of our shots are our further shots. A lot of our birds are typically more plumbed out and they're bigger and they're heavier and they're denser. And by the time they get down here, they got more feather, you know, those birds are harder, a little harder to kill. You know, those, those smaller rounds, they just, they don't seem to put them down near the same that they do, you know, the further north you get. And yeah, it's, it's, I mean, I don't, I don't really hung with anything less than, less than the 12 gauge and back half of the year, we like to shoot three and a halfs, you know, just, just give me that extra 20 yards. Give me that little bit different, you know, a little bit bigger pattern. Let me get onto that bird just a little bit better. You know, we're not really shooting birds up in our face the whole time. You know, we're, we're shooting big wads of birds that are, that are, you know, they don't want to land on the shoreline. They want to land 70 yards off the shoreline. Sometimes it's about pulling the decoys on top of the shoreline to get them laying 50 yards, or sometimes it's about putting the decoys a hundred yards off the shoreline and try to get them laying on the inside of the decoys. It's a tough little game down here. It's these birds, they just, they don't want anything really to do with being up and tight on the grass. You know, so that's where you're sitting your butt at. And, you know, you just got to kind of play with it and figure out your range. But you know, that, that bigger gauge

38:07 John Gordon definitely helps a lot. I got a 10 gauge that I'm going to bring down there to the bay this year. I want to try that baby out down there. It's primarily my goose gun, but I thought this is,

38:17 Zack Shannon that's a great place for it. We'll go sit. We got some spots where, you know, we'll do ducks. We've got ducks, geese and sandhills on, on the marsh on a couple spots. That'd be a great place

38:27 John Gordon for it. That's another interesting point. You talk about sandhill cranes. When I was growing up in Texas, that part of the world was off limits to hunting sandhills and they changed those regulations several years ago. It's all related to the whipping cranes, but I don't ever see that. I saw two whipping cranes in Rockport area. I still, I don't think that there's very many whipping cranes

38:45 Zack Shannon anymore on the Texas coast. No, we didn't see a single one last year. We saw one on a refuge when we were scouting, you know, we'll drive through the refuges and, you know, we'll sit on the trucks and sit up on top of the trucks and binoculars looking through the ponds and looking through everything, scouting, you know, and that kind of tells us where we need to set up on the bay, depending on where those birds are going to leave the refuge. And we saw one last year,

39:09 John Gordon but I never saw one hunting not one time last year. So the sandhill hunting is really good, but like I said, it used to be below 35. You couldn't hunt sandhills and they've changed that in the last few years. So it's a bonus and encourage you to hunt sandhill cranes just for the fact that they're great to eat. And people talk about that all the time, but you don't know

39:28 Zack Shannon what they're talking about until you do it. Yeah, they're delicious. You know, we tilled so many the last couple of years that, you know, it's, it's, we kind of started venturing out with it in the beginning. We just ate them like a steak on the grill and, you know, just grilled them up like a steak. You know, last year we did, you know, I bring some home and we did, I did beef stroganoff, but with sandhill crane one day. And, you know, we did chicken fried, crane and gravy over mashed potatoes one day. And, you know, it's just, it's just cool, you know, in anything that, you know, pretty much you do with a steak and pretty much do with a crane. I started kind of treating them like a, you know, like a cheaper cut of steak, you know, kind of the weird things you do with a cheaper cut of steak to, you know, like, like, you know, tacos and all this stuff. And pretty much what I started doing with the crane and that really made it like, I was like, man, these birds are, these birds are something else, man. They're pretty good.

40:21 John Gordon They are great. They are great. Well, Zach, thanks so much for being with us on the DU podcast, man. It's been great. Yeah, man. Thanks, Cordo. It was great having you. And it's Captain Shannon's Charters, am I correct? Yes. Is that what you, it's your outfit down there. So anybody looking for a great time on the, you know, Matagorda Bay area and you fish some out of Port

40:40 Zack Shannon O'Connor as well. I know we film down there some. Yep. Yeah. So, you know, I'll chase the Bull Reds and the Triple Tail down in Port O'Connor and then do a lot of my offshore stuff out of Port O'Connor and do our snapper and, you know, come the late fall, early winter, we'll be chasing, we'll be going way out looking for tuna and, you know, Amberjacks and doing all that stuff. So doing most of my offshore stuff out of Port O'Connor and, you know, I kind of learned how to do my saltwater stuff in East Calveston Bay, you know, so I kind of, you know,

41:07 John Gordon float around everywhere, but, but East Matagorda Bay has pretty much become my home. That's right. It's, it's a great place to be. All right, Zach, thanks again, man, for being with us on the DU podcast and thanks everybody for listening and supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.