It weighed less than 90 pounds and was Coast Guard certified. The first layout boat the company produced was the single-person Classic. You had to tow them, and getting from point A to point B took a long time, because you couldn't pull them fast enough." "The boats that we used back in the '70s and '80s had problems, the biggest being that they were just too heavy. "We started the business because we wanted to be more successful at something we had a passion for doing," Bires says. They called their northern Indiana-based company, partially in jest, the Mighty Layout Boys. Greg Bires says our layout boat was simply called "The Classic." During the 1990s, Bires and fellow diving duck hunting enthusiast Mark Rongers built a small business specializing in the production of traditional Great Lakes layout boats and hunting accessories. I had learned an important lesson about this unique style of hunting: You've got to slow down, not only to make your shots, but also to really appreciate what you're doing out there. This time, I made the shot and flagged down Tim to come retrieve our first duck taken from the layout boat. He sat there as I reloaded and flushed as I sat up to shoot.
I looked up to see ripples settling from a drake bufflehead that had come flitting into the decoys. So the light splash that I heard beside the boat was almost deafening. I looked around, waiting for Tim to give me hell, but he was hundreds of yards away in the tender boat. Compared to the pace of a dabbling duck hunt, gunning big-water divers is like watching a video on fast-forward. The entire encounter, from the sound of the ripping tape to the bolt of my empty gun locking open, was over in a matter of seconds.
The flock came in so fast and so close that I panicked and emptied my gun in the general direction of the flock as it roared past the boat. The birds swing them like rudders on final approach, and if you can see them, it's a sure sign that it's time to shoot. Suddenly, I was jarred by what sounded like ripping duct tapethe telltale rush of frigid air being cut by slashing wingsas a knot of 10 bluebills roared right overhead, banking hard into the wind with their webbed feet down. You're alone with your thoughts, the prevailing one being that the odds of a cold and miserable death suddenly seem much greater than they were a short while ago. There's not much to listen to in a layout boat except for the waves lapping against the fiberglass hull. I climbed in, and Tim handed me my shotgun before motoring away in the big boat to watch from afar. Fortunately, we were over a sandbar where it was shallow enough to wade, and we'd had the foresight to bring along a bailing bucket.Īn hour later, we had the layout boat anchored upwind of three dozen bluebill decoys bobbing in a light chop. We started out a little too fast, inundating the layout boat's cockpit with several gallons of green Tennessee River water. We probably shouldn't have been so cocky, though, considering we had no experience whatsoever with this type of waterfowling.
The outboard started quickly and we were on our way, feeling almost smug about what was in store. That day, we thought, our fortunes would change. We'd watched them for years and had set up on the islands plenty of times, trying to pull stragglers off their flight paths without much luck. Bluebills flew that stretch of water like a busy highway. Our plan was to set up in a secondary channel between a pair of islands. We embarked on our maiden voyage shortly after sunrise on a cold January day, towing the layout boat behind my 16-foot War Eagle. My buddy Tim had found the one-person layout boat for sale online, and we bought it, certain it was the cure for all our bluebill-hunting woes. We nearly sank it the first time we took it out.
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