Back in the internet stone ages way before social media platforms, old-school do-it-yourself duck hunters from around the world gathered in online communities known as duck hunting chatrooms–sharing local traditions, exchanging ideas, swapping hunts. It was almost like discovering fire! Decades later, Duckboats.net still exists and is thriving like a most-popular Smalltown, USA coffeeshop. “The best duck boats stand out at the boat ramp but vanish in the marsh,” says duckboat.net founder Eric Patterson, when we started talking about constructing and using various type duck boats deployed throughout North America. More than just duck boats though, this old school community covers an everything-under-the-sun broad range of waterfowl- and life-related topics. Today’s conversation meanders through the most interesting things found while hunting (y’all ain’t goin to believe what he found in Alabama), public land hunter harrasment, duck hunting then versus now, chatrooms versus social media, and the good, bad, and downright ugly things wrought by the internet.
Related Links:
Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today we’re going to channel way back down the rabbit hole preceding social media into an older form of mass communication, especially around the duck hunting world and introducing you all today to my buddy from Alabama, Mr. Eric Patterson, who is the moderator and I think owner of an OG form of communication called a chatroom, duckboats.net. Eric, how the heck are you today?
Eric Patterson: I’m doing fantastic. And I tell you, it’s a pleasure and an honor to be here, I’ve been fan of yours and your show for quite some time and never saw myself sitting on this side of the video or the camera or the audio of it.
Ramsey Russell: Eric, the truth of the matter is, this is the first time I’ve met you. Of course, I’m meeting you over Zoom. But I feel like I’ve known you for decades, going all the way back to the chatroom days. In fact, I can remember a lot of folks listening, may not come remember this, but you all hang with us for a minute. I can remember, of course, when I was 21, 22 years old, before I ever pushed the start button on a computer. I was dumb as a brick and didn’t grow up in that age. In fact, I can remember being on the mountain side in Colorado talking to a bunch of kids from out west and them talking about all these computers and all this stuff and me just shrugging it off like it was a fad. Can you imagine? That’s how backwards I was, I thought computers were a fad and that can’t possibly replace the way we were doing things back in the day. But all along, I can remember my first introduction to digital communication online, it was an old platform called Sporting Adventures. Do you remember that? S P A V, they called SPAV.
Eric Patterson: I absolutely remember that and that is what gave birth to many websites that exploded in the years that followed the demise of SPAV. There was a lot of big personalities on that website, a lot of discussion, a lot of arguments, a lot of insults, a lot of information. All that was happening in SPAV –
Ramsey Russell: Well, it was a whole new platform. It was a whole new way of communicating because everybody with this Internet and not wanting big brother and everybody to watch, everybody had an alias. I don’t even remember mine back in the day, but everybody had an alias and it took a while of going to the virtual coffee shop, so to speak, before you began to know the people behind the alias, but it was different. And so people were grasping with, whereas previous to the Internet, you would talk to people and say to people what you had to say to not get punched in the mouth or something, to behave right. We had this decorum about us and all of a sudden, you had this platform where you could – and it was so crazy how even in the first incarnations of the Internet, chat rooms, people took on these alter egos and these personas and began to troll and it became quickly apparent that digital communication was almost like mind reading, because people would say and do things supposedly with an anonymity that they would never say out loud in the light of day, in a crowd at duck camp or in a duck boat or at church or nothing else. It’s like humanity kind of took a took a turn off the rails at that point.
From Old-School to Modern Day Media Platforms
When did duckboats.net emerge?
Eric Patterson: Yeah, there were a lot of, I guess you call it Internet fist fights that went on. People get pretty brave behind keyboards that they wouldn’t say face to face and you’re right, there was a lot of use of bogus names, a lot of self aggrandizing names, guys want to be known as Mallard Masher and Duck Smasher and all those sort of things that I guess sort of build themselves up and amongst their peers. But you may recall the – every time you posted, you would enter your name and it would list your IP address. So after a while, people would start to figure out who was who based upon their IP and then along came an anonymizer service and guys could log into a different website and post through a proxy and it would hide their IP and then they would go on and they would say some really insulting things and they could get away with it because no one had any way of tracing. Probably the beginnings of the science of cybersecurity was started in those forms.
Ramsey Russell: It really hasn’t changed much at all. You go into these modern day social media platforms, there is no IP address. It’s complete anonymous, as somebody, you put yourself out there like we do, you put yourself out there and you’re going to get trolled by anti hunters, by haters, by self loathers, by whatever, just by bored people that have nothing to do but look for something to set off and start trolling you. I learned way back when, I don’t know who invented this saying and I hate to be crude and ugly, but it’s the truth, winning the Internet argument’s kind of like winning the Special Olympics. Regardless of who wins or loses, you’re still in the Special Olympics, right?
Eric Patterson: Yeah, that’s right. But just despite all the – it would get pretty, I guess you’d call Internet violent at times. A lot of insults and things, some of it was funny, some of it wasn’t so funny, but there were a lot of really good discussions, a lot of discussions about ethics and the morality of hunting and things that I probably learned from to help form the type of person, the type of hunter that I am today was reading what some people had to say and there were some very bright people, there were some very deep thinkers in the sport of waterfowling and I was exposed to things that I probably never would have been exposed to if I just stayed in amongst my little peers here locally.
Ramsey Russell: The Internet changed everything and there’s a lot of good to be said about that, Eric, you’re exactly right. All we were exposed to previous to the Internet was whatever’s in arms reach in our immediate surrounding, a friend, we hunted like they hunted, we hunted what they hunted, we learned and did what they did and the Internet came up all of a sudden. We realized, oh, there’s different ways of doing this. There’s better ways, it opened up the entire world, my whole duck hunting world opened up with the advent of the Internet.
Eric Patterson: It sure did. One example I think of is understanding better how the management process at the federal level works. Before the Internet, we had no idea how that worked, not many people could go down and get the federal register and read that and figure out how this stuff was and all of a sudden, you had federal biologists coming on board and answering questions. I’m sure you remember, like Larry Reynolds.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Eric Patterson: He was Larry Allen Reynolds law, going way back to the spout days but he was tirelessly answering questions about how the process works of setting seasons and surveys. And so there was a lot of really, I found it very both interesting and valuable information to have that as a waterfowl hunter and understand a little bit more than what just happens in my particular little marsh that I’m hunting.
Ramsey Russell: When did duckboats.net emerge? I remember it back in that era, back in those days, you had sporting adventures that kind of faded and evolved into Refuge Forums and MS Ducks and duckboats.net, I seem to remember, but a half dozen more of, there was Ohio Forum. And I just made the rounds on all of them getting all the information and getting exposed as much new stuff as I possibly could.
Eric Patterson: Yeah, it formed, it was kind of a timing thing, like many things in life are. I was starting to build my first boat, my first attempt and I can tell you about that later, first attempt failed and I started to do the second one and I had a, just a website where I was showing pictures and kind of the process and talking about it. And I started getting emails, a lot of emails and Sam Devlin, the designer of the boat that I was building, started getting a lot of emails. And I talked to Sam a few times and it was almost disruptive, I think, at times his business, because people were asking him questions about boats and he’s trying to be out in the shop building boats. So I told Sam I said, well, why don’t I put a form on my website and that way we can just field questions about this particular boat that I’m building and your boats in particular. And so I’ve got a free script, I don’t know if you remember www.boatmattwrightscipt, it was one of the first forum systems used and had no security, no nothing, you typed in your name and your post and hit enter, that was it. Anyway, we launched that and that was about the time SPAV was imploding. I’m not quite sure, I don’t remember the final straw, my span SPAV left or what, I don’t know if it was a business decision of the owners. I don’t know if it was because of just the turmoil that the forms were creating amongst the participants or what. But anyway, it was dying and while it was making its last breaths, I just posted a few times, I mean, maybe 2 or 3 times. Hey, I’ve started a forum about duck boats and building duck boats come on board. And it went real quick. I started getting people coming in every day, I was seeing new faces and the discussions were becoming lengthy and a lot of them. There were a few times during the peak when I get 700 posts a day, which is a lot, I think, by any platform status. Maybe the refuge probably overshadowed that quite a bit, but by most of the forums, it was, it got very active. And you were asking earlier about the, was it just duck boats or was it other things? And it’s, that’s when it started –
An Online Duck Hunting Community
Those guys know how to repair wooden boats and they’ll show up and they’ll ask questions and typically they get answers so it’s kind of like a collection of people that have a little bit of special knowledge that most other sites might not have or at least not have in the concentration that we’ve been able to develop over the years.
Ramsey Russell: What I’d asked Eric, because I’m a member of duckboats.net today. But what I had asked is, how would you describe this community? Is it a duck boat building type culture or is it a community, figuratively speaking like we’re all sitting in a duck boat, it’s a little boat, isn’t it?
Eric Patterson: It is. It’s a community of guys and women who, we have a few ladies that all enjoy the company of fellow duck hunters, many discussion related to duck hunting and many discussions not related to duck hunting are brought up on a daily basis and then there’s the discussions about boats. We have people come in all the time, just probably because they googled us or someone said, hey, you got a boat question go over to duckboats.net dude. Those guys know how to repair wooden boats and they’ll show up and they’ll ask questions and typically they get answers so it’s kind of like a collection of people that have a little bit of special knowledge that most other sites might not have or at least not have in the concentration that we’ve been able to develop over the years.
Ramsey Russell: So what year would you say you started building that boat and potion it up and it evolved into this primitive form called duckboats.net? The initial incarnation, about what year would that have been? Late 90s, early 1000s?
Eric Patterson: No, it was spring of 98.
Ramsey Russell: 98. Good guys –
Eric Patterson: Yes, spring of 98.
Ramsey Russell: Nearly 30 years ago.
Eric Patterson: Yeah. 26 years, time goes to it.
Ramsey Russell: We were young men back then. Now, I’m going to tell you what, that’s almost, I guarantee there’s people listening today going, that’s like caveman days, drawing on the wall or something compared to what the world become then.
Eric Patterson: My oldest son, I’ve got a picture of him in his diaper standing in the boat while I was building it. He’s a grown man now. So it did, the time moved very quickly.
Building a DIY Culture in Hunting
But I can remember one of the most prevailing topics or parts of Wildfowl Magazine back in the day was like a section that involved users or readers, subscribers would submit their plans or their concoction or what they did to build a blind or build a boat or build something.
Ramsey Russell: Times have changed since in the last 30 years because, for example, Wildfowl Magazine, which at the time, it may still be one of the largest waterfowl specific, subscription based things, most people don’t read paper print type stuff anymore, it’s all digital consumption. But I can remember on Wildfowl Magazine and this goes a lot to who you are and what your webpage is. But I can remember one of the most prevailing topics or parts of Wildfowl Magazine back in the day was like a section that involved users or readers, subscribers would submit their plans or their concoction or what they did to build a blind or build a boat or build something. And it was like a how to plan of, how to do stuff and it really wasn’t unique because we all made stuff. I mean, I still rummage around piles of stuff I’ve got laid around at camper, at home and my homemade decoys or my homemade – Mr. Ian and I both had carriages we put over top of our 4 wheelers, we could carry put our boats and put our decoys and put our stuff, just little homemade something and others that went over the top, like a roll cage or something and that we could strap everything on and get a lot of gear out to the field on nothing but a 4 wheeler. But that was whole, everybody did that, back in those days, we all made stuff back in those days, it almost like you weren’t a real duck hunter if you didn’t make something.
Duck Hunting on a Shoestring
That brings back memories of decoys, buying decoys was an expensive venture when you’re in high school or college student and we would, we had paper classifieds.
Eric Patterson: Yeah, you’d show it off, too. You go out there and say, I remember one time I needed a stand for my dog, that was long before the days of the Momarsh stands or all the other manufacturers have them. So I took just a little piece of quarter inch plywood and some 2 by 2s and made something up, a little ratchet strap, hung it on a tree and I was proud as could be that I was like, I need to show other people this and you get kind of a satisfaction when your buddies look at something that you built and they, oh, that’s pretty cool or maybe you could improve it by doing this. And so some of those little projects start taking on a life or become eventually become a hobby. How can I make these things for myself, that I can use all my money?
Ramsey Russell: Back in those days, I was a broke college kid and it just, besides, didn’t have any money to go and buy a bunch of stuff. There wasn’t a lot of stuff out there in the market that for needs I needed or that exactly fit my style or exactly what I needed. So we kind of made it ourselves and there was no shame at all in it. There was no shame at all over hunting – And I’m not talking beautiful hand carved decoys like Costillo or Gregory or somebody like that makes today, I’m talking about there was no shame in painting your old decoys or just old decoys, the generations old decoys. We go out there and slap some paint on it or make our own lead weights or just everything, boats and stands and just everything was homemade and it was fun, it gave us, it was kind of how we wiled away the long stretch between duck seasons.
Eric Patterson: Yeah. That brings back memories of decoys, buying decoys was an expensive venture when you’re in high school or college student and we would, we had paper classifieds. It was long before the Internet or any sort of Craigslist marketplace or anything like that. But we’d look through the little local rags and we’d find someone selling decoys and we’d go buy them. And they’d be some old, what, carry lights or flambeaus or something like that. And we’d spend Saturday afternoons listening to football games with a few cans of paint, some acid brushes and painting them up black and white to be divers or whatever, but they were all gathered up very cheaply and they weren’t very pretty, either. But you kind of took a sense of pride when you were hunting over those things. Because you’re like I did this, this is the rig that I put together on a shoestring budget and there was some satisfaction that you got out of that.
Ramsey Russell: Yep. I’m going to change subjects. Where are you from? Where do you live? Where’d you grow up?
Eric Patterson: I live here in Huntsville, Alabama or just outside of Huntsville, a little town called Owens Cross Roads. Grew up in Huntsville, I was the first of the family born here. My parents are Midwesterners from St. Louis, I have 2 brothers, they were also born in St. Louis. Dad took a job, he was an engineer in the missile industry, took a job here in Huntsville and Redstone Arsenal and moved everyone down here and then I was born. He was not a hunter, other than he hunted rabbits on the family farm in Missouri, in Farmington, growing up and he had fond memories of that and when I was about 14 years old, I started, friends were starting to get into hunting and it seemed like a fun thing to do and I was like, will you take me hunting? He didn’t have a shotgun. I think he had one shotgun at that time. But anyway, so we went and got a few shotguns and just started going rabbit hunting and probably went 2 or 3 times and I had friends in high school that were all about duck hunting and I asked them, will you take me? And they took me and the first hunt I ever went on, it was kind of one of those, oh, yeah, this is me –
Alabama Die Hard Duck Hunters
Yep, cut our teeth hunting in Swan Creek.
Ramsey Russell: Was it Alabama? Is that where you all were hunting back then? Your high school buddies were big, die hard duck hunters in the state of Alabama?
Eric Patterson: Oh, yeah. Some of them still hunt today, but, yeah, we hunted Lake Guntersville, I know you’re familiar with that. And Swan Creek, you did a show on Swan Creek?
Ramsey Russell: I did. I sure did.
Eric Patterson: Early in the fall. Yep, cut our teeth hunting in Swan Creek.
Ramsey Russell: I drove through there just the other day on the way to Nashville and thought about that. When did you start branching out and going to other places to duck hunt?
Eric Patterson: College. Went to University of South Alabama in Mobile on the Mobile Delta, which is interesting because the geology of North Alabama and South Alabama are about as different as you can get. We’re a valley up here with a river flowing through it and down there, it’s coastal marsh, a large freshwater drainage basin there with the Mobile and Tensaw rivers flowing into the Mobile Bay. So I hunted down there, took my boat down there and had a good friend of mine whose parents didn’t mind me park it in their backyard. So we cut class on Thursdays and head out to the bay and hunt Fridays and Saturdays, that was back when they had a rule there was no, I think it was Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday hunting only. There was no weekday hunting, at least early part of the week. But had a good time doing that and graduated school and walked across the platform on a Sunday and started my first job on a Monday.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Eric Patterson: So back here in Huntsville, I had no intentions whatsoever of coming back to Huntsville. I was like, I’m going to Oregon or Washington, that’s where the best duck hunting in the United States is. That’s where I want to go.
Ramsey Russell: See and there we go back to the Internet where it wasn’t just the people you met. It’s like, I can remember reading a book back in college, Wings on the Horizon or something like that, about duck hunting around the world and it really, gosh, I was in my young mid 20s and it really opened up my eyes to, wow, there really is a lot of duck. But, boy, there’s a lot of duck hunting worldwide, I was going to say. But, boy, when we got on the Internet and all of a sudden, guys like yourself in Alabama and guys like me in Mississippi and guys out in Washington and guys out in Oregon and guys out in New York and all these people started posting these pictures. Man, my wish list was a mile long of places I wanted to go and things I wanted to see and all this different stuff. It really, I would say that might be the genesis of the big duck hunting travel bug was just seeing and experiencing all the different opportunities just around North America that I was previously unaware of.
Scouting the Internet for the Best Duck Hunts Around the World
Eric Patterson: Oh, surely. So the exposure I had when I, like I said earlier, I wanted to move to Washington or Oregon. I’d only seen pictures of magazines and I knew they had a longer season, that was about all I really knew. That was before the Internet. So I didn’t really have a way, there was no sort of job search mechanism available for me at that time. So you kind of wound up going your local newspaper and so that’s what brought me back here. But, yeah, they and then it was a few years later when the Internet did, was Al Gore discovered it and put it out there for everyone. But, yeah, it was an eye opener because all of a sudden, you started seeing sea ducks, wow, I’d seen pictures of magazines, but I’d never seen people actually doing it, never seen how they did it on both coasts. Oh, they do it Maine, too, you kill eiders in Maine. I didn’t know that and so it was just a huge eye opener and like you were saying in the early days, when you got on forums, it was people from all over the place. They were scattered from all over the country and then that sort of changed when you got the refuge, who decided to organize their forms by state and then all of a sudden, you had one state that has a lot of opportunities in other states that don’t, and you’d see people from the states that don’t looking into the states that would and it kind of created this whole phenomenon of Internet scouting.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Eric Patterson: And that was something we didn’t deal with in the early days, but as time went on, I think that became a big issue and people probably to this day are a little bit leery of forums and posting stuff on them, probably on social media as well, for that fact.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy, you better be, it was some of the main criticism back in the days were when the magazines would do a story, top 10 hunts or top 5 hunts or top 10 places or do a feature story on a specific wetland somewhere and all the locals would wake up the next day and see dozens of trucks prowling around out of state plays and stuff. Well, then the Internet came along and it got, it blew up on steroids. I can remember talking, having long discussions, seeing these threads about specific WMAs and that’s all underground now, nobody mentioned that. Heck, Eric, I even I turn off just because I don’t, just in case there’s a way to figure it out. I turn off a lot of the location services on social media before I post photos, I don’t want nobody. They might recognize the background if they’ve hunted there, but I don’t want to put it on a map to anybody that’s smarter than me to dig around and find it.
Eric Patterson: Yeah. Oh, I can remember some of the earliest pictures that were posted from cell phones and people didn’t realize those location services were turned on and those that were a little bit more Internet savvy would just like you’re saying, they grab those pictures and they’d get the coordinates off of it and then they’d know exactly where those guys were.
Ramsey Russell: Know exactly where they were.
Eric Patterson: Yeah, they know the exact hole that they were in. So it’s, you got to be careful out there if you want to keep your spots to yourself.
Ramsey Russell: Where do you hunt nowadays? Where do you mostly hunt nowadays? Still up in Northern Alabama or elsewhere?
Eric Patterson: Yeah, mostly in North Alabama. In recent years, I’ve transitioned, I used to be about 90% public lands and maybe 10% private and in the last few years, that’s really reversed. I’m spending most of my time on private now, less on public, for several reasons, but and we make trips to Arkansas and then over the years, I’ve traveled to other places, like Wisconsin, hunted on pool nine with the Mighty Layout Boys and that was a hunt of a lifetime there. But some great stories from that, but most mostly around here, I’ve been blessed to have through my employer. He, the owner of the founder of my company, he’s passed away, but he believed in purchasing, with his profits from his business, he believed in purchasing hunting land. And so, he started buying hunting land.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
How to Prepare the Perfect Duck Hunting Property
But it was, that was sort of the beginning of hunting public less and hunting private more because I was granted access to some north, by North Alabama standards, some pretty good hunting grounds.
Eric Patterson: Yeah, he started buying hunting land. I think he wound up buying close to 3000 acres in here in Arkansas. And about 2010 or 11, he called me in his office and said, if you go check your box, there’s a piece of paper in there. He said, there’s a permit, I’m going to grant you access to one of my pieces of property for this season. And I was like, wow, that’s fantastic. So my son and I started going out to this piece of property, enjoyed the hunting there and started having ideas on how we could improve it. And so I went back and talked to Wally and he’s like, yeah, I think we should do that before you know it, on getting an education and managing properties and everything from building water control structures to plow and ground for crops and moist soil management and sort of all these things that people are doing today, obviously. But it was, that was sort of the beginning of hunting public less and hunting private more because I was granted access to some north, by North Alabama standards, some pretty good hunting grounds.
Ramsey Russell: Could you tell me this? You told me this, we were winding up for the recording, but I’ll ask it this way in the same way it might be posted on a thread, on a chat room, but what’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever found while duck hunting?
Eric Patterson: Oh, there’s no question, the most interesting I ever found happened 2 years ago. I found a dead body and that’s –
Ramsey Russell: A dead body.
Eric Patterson: A dead body. Yeah, I’ve seen the question come up on forms from time to time, what have you found out there? And I think this one tops it all. I mean, yeah, I was and I’ll preface this, I’ll go through the story with you. I’ll preface it by saying the odds of me having found that were astronomical and I sit here, anytime I think about it, I’m like, there was no way that body was going to be found unless I got up and did something out of the unordinary, it was extraordinary circumstances. So let me see if I can kind of relay the lay of the land so it makes a little more sense. This person had gone missing, he went hiking on the management area. Excuse me, I’ll get some drink. He went hiking on the management area where people don’t typically hike, that’s for hunters. But he decided to go hunt, so he went in, he crossed private property and the farmer saw him and said, hey, you shouldn’t be, don’t park your car on my property. He explained to the farmer, he said, oh, I just wanted to hike and get on the management area. And the farmer said, okay, don’t do this again, but I’m not going to make you move. So anyway, he was down there and a few hours later, some rabbit hunters heard a man screaming for help. And they didn’t know what was going on and so they called the authorities and authorities went out there and they realized they had a missing body. The man never came back to his truck and they went out there and they used dogs and they used drones and they use a helicopter and they use a rescue squad and they look for him for 3 weeks and they never found him. So he was obviously had perished. And so I’m sitting there at my desk one day at work, it’s COVID and it was real slow. And I was like I haven’t been, this place called the Barbie swamp. I’m like, I haven’t been to the Barbie swamp in a while. And that place housed, I don’t know how many birds we killed out of that in the 90s, in the early 2000s. It was an amazing piece of flooded timber. I mean, it was Arkansas quality in Alabama. So I go up there, I take my boat, I leave behind lunchtime and just so you understand the geography, you launch your boat, you run upriver and it runs about 10 miles along the river. So this is a long stretch, it’s a long swamp and I run up there and I climbed the bank. And you have to climb the bank, you got to walk through trees and thick bracket briars and stuff, push through a few fields until you finally get to the water. So I went to one place and the water was out of there. I’m like, that’s odd, there’s no water in here. I was expecting it, so I backtracked and went back to the second spot and it was a place that I’d wanted to look at and I thought there might still be some birds here. And so I climbed the bank and I walked in and I just walked a straight line and I got to the water’s edge and I started pushing through tupelo thicket and I caught a whiff of something. And I’m like, it was a sharp smell. I thought, that’s not right and then it hit me, I’m like, oh, my God, I just found this man. I’m like –
Ramsey Russell: Because it doesn’t, when he’s – Dead humans don’t smell like dead deer, dead rabbits or –
Eric Patterson: No, no.
Ramsey Russell: They don’t smell at all like it.
Eric Patterson: It, the best way, I would say, is it’s a sharp smell. It like singes, but in the, lucky for me, I mean, this is December, it’s almost January. So we’re below freezing at night and the daytime’s not getting warm. So it was kind of like a body had been in a refrigerator for 3 weeks. So the smell –
Ramsey Russell: What happened to him? What was he hollering for help for? Had he gotten bogged down in some quicksand or –
Eric Patterson: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m glad you asked that. This particular swamp, the state has not exactly done the best job, I hate to be critical, but it’s the truth. They have not done the best job at dealing with the beavers and getting the water out of there and what happened was there’s a couple invasive aquatic species I’m sure you’re familiar with, alligator weed and water –
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Eric Patterson: And they get in and they form, if the water’s waist deep, thigh deep, it forms impenetrable mats. I mean, it’s so thick, you can’t walk through. It is so thick, cattails and willow trees can grow on top of it, that’s how dense it gets. It gets super dense. He didn’t have waders on, why he entered the water, I don’t know. To this day, that perplexes me, because he had to walk across that swamp, across several creeks to get to where I found him. And that just isn’t something that a hiker does. Why he went the way he did. Maybe he got disoriented, maybe it was getting dark and he was lost and just kept pushing and was pushing the wrong way, I’m not sure, but anyway, I smelled that’s that unusual smell that does not belong in a swamp. There’s lots of methane gas and stuff that oozes out of the ground, but it was not that. So, it was thick and I couldn’t see anything. So I got kind of down below the all the button bush and the branches and everything and I looked and 10ft away from me, there he was. He was slumped over a log. His feet were in the water and his head and his arms were in the water and his torso and his hip were resting on the log and my heart starts pounding. I’m like, oh, my gosh, I just found this guy. How did this happen? So I called my son and my son still in school at the time, was in school at Auburn. I called Thomas and I said, Thomas, you’re not going to believe what just happened. He goes, what? I said, I found that guy. He goes, found who? I said, there’s a guy missing, it was on the news. He goes, oh, my gosh, you’re kidding. I was like, no. I said, I got to go. I got to call the authorities. So at that point, I probably wouldn’t think that straight, I was like, well, I’ll call the area manager. So I tried calling at that time it was, I think, Austin Lacroix, couldn’t get Austin. And I was like, I’ll call the 1800 stop poachers now. Because I was thinking this would be a management area, they’d have to get in there and do something. I got the 1800 number and I told the lady, said, yeah, I want to report that I found a body and she’s like, sir, you don’t need a game board, you need the sheriff. I was like, I guess you’re right, I guess this would be a matter for the law. So I called the sheriff and he was like, where are you? How’d you get there and I explained to him, I came by boat and I dropped a pin and he still wasn’t sure how he could get his equipment down there. And I said, look, let me just meet you at the ramp. So I met him back at the ramp and started talking to him. And I said there’s easy way in there if the landowner will give you permission to get there. And he’s like, permission? I’m on a recovery mission, I don’t need permission. Once again, I was thinking like a hunter and not just a normal citizen on a legal matter. So they called the Jackson county rescue squad and it, sun had set by then, it was dark and we all met up on the farmers land that’s adjacent to this swamp. His last name is actually Barbie, like the swamp. But I met up there, rounded up all their equipment and we went back down in there and they said, can you find him again? I said, yeah, I know where he is, so we walked in that trail and well, it wasn’t even a trail, just busting through it and I got within about 10ft of again, I pointed, I said, he’s right over there. And one of the guys walked over and goes, yep, got him. And so they drug a canoe in and we rolled the body into the canoe and drug it out. And this was kind of odd, it surprised me, I guess it makes sense. But I’ll ask you, what do you think the first thing they would do when they found a body and you get it out of the water? What would you do?
Ramsey Russell: I have no idea. I don’t even know where to start with something like this.
Eric Patterson: They took his wallet out and got his identification and then they took his shirt off and I asked the guy said, why are you taking the shirt off? He said, we’re looking for signs of foul play.
Ramsey Russell: Oh.
Eric Patterson: I was like, okay, that makes sense. Although under the circumstances, he went missing. I guess, there could have been a deer hunter, not supposed to have deer hunters from that part of management. I guess he could have accidentally been shot or something. So we drug him out and that was kind of it. I went home after that and took a while to process all that had happened and didn’t sleep good for a few nights. It wasn’t a disturbing thing. It wasn’t like, oh that’s gross, that’s gory. It wasn’t that at all, it was just me thinking about this man and his family and they finally got closure. They didn’t know what had happened to him, 3 weeks had gone by and they just knew he was gone. So they I’m sure that that helped that family some closure. But, like I started talking about earlier, the thing, when I think about it, I’m sitting at work 12:00 in the afternoon and I decided to go to a swamp that I hadn’t hunted in years. Why did I do that, why did I climb the bank and walk a straight line straight to, I mean, you could have stretched a string and it wasn’t like there was a trail, it wasn’t like it was a known walking path, this was me picking a random spot and wanted to see what the water conditions were in the swamp. And I walked right to them.
Ramsey Russell: It just crazy.
Eric Patterson: That to me is the most amazing thing about it is the circumstances that led me to it are unexplainable.
Ramsey Russell: That’s kind of a strange story and kind of a, must have been a weird feeling. Have you ever been back to that particular spot to hunt ducks or is that just somewhere you say, I ain’t going back there?
Eric Patterson: No. Well, no, I have not. But it’s not because of that. Because they can’t get the water out, because they haven’t been able to control the beavers. This very large and very productive stretch of wetlands is not huntable anymore. There’s not much water visible anymore. It’s totally choked out by the water primrose and the alligator weed. So I wish it wasn’t so, I wish it was still productive again, I wish the state had resources to resuscitate it, to make it productive again. But they, to this point, they haven’t done that. So until that happens and that’s a young man’s hunt too. That’s a lot of work to get in there. I’m not getting any younger. My son could do it, I’d go with him and his friends if they wanted to carry the load. But probably I may have hunted for the, may have been down there for the last time. We’ll see.
The Most Interesting Finds While Duck Hunting
Ramsey Russell: That’s a heck of a shocking thing to find while duck hunting. And the whole time you’re telling your story, I can’t think of anything interesting I found while duck hunting.
Eric Patterson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Let alone something like that. That would disturb me.
Eric Patterson: Yeah. Well, I’ll be honest. As I was walking out, walking through the field, headed back to my boat to get to the launch, I got choked up. I was like, that’s someone’s father, that’s someone’s grandfather, he was 65 years old. I’m like that man because I figure he was loved by his family, I’m like and he’s gone. And they’re going to be up there, this has just been devastating on, so it was again it was just the odds of me finding it, I still, I can’t comprehend it. I’m a man of science, I’m a statistician by degree and by education and that one still blows me away.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. What are the odds, you’re a statistician, what are the odds of you leaving work and walking straight line to something like it? One in a million.
Eric Patterson: You got to – you may be less than that because you had drones and helicopters and dogs and rescue missions rescue team out there and they couldn’t find him and I walked straight to him. It’s just uncomprehensible.
Ramsey Russell: Where else have you hunted, outside of Alabama? Wisconsin, Arkansas? You’ve been around, you talk about hunting with the Mighty Layout Boys. It’s crazy, I was hunting with Pat Gregory and doc up on a pool in the Mississippi river and we got to talking about the Mighty Layout Boys and I sent them, several of them, a text. They came down and visited me in Mississippi many years ago. And we hunted a stretch of Mississippi river and I reached out to them and man, they’re no longer in, they’re no longer the Mighty Layout Boys lifestyle. They’ve moved on, doing different things and different things in their life and everything else now. But I actually talked to them via text message just a couple of months ago.
Hunting Public in Arkansas
Eric Patterson: Yeah. Did they, when they hunted with you, I hope they told you the stories, but did they ever tell you about the Tom Reed, the old market hunter that they had encountered when they’re in their earliest year? Oh, those stories are priceless.
Ramsey Russell: If they did, remind me. I haven’t heard this story that I can recall.
Eric Patterson: He was an old market hunter and they hunted this lake when they were teenagers in high school and this guy was an old, crusty old guy that didn’t like any competition on his lake and he gave them hell. He did not like them on the lake, he didn’t like them showing up in their little sneak boxes, he didn’t like their style of hunting and he cussed them out and they had a lot of really colorful stories about him. And then as time went on, he befriended them and yeah, he comes by and Mark’s at the cabin and he knocks on Mark’s door and he’s like, I’m going to hunt in the morning. Why don’t you come with me? Mark goes out there and anyway, the story kind of changes and there’s a lot of funny things to it. I let Mark – you got a call Mark, you got to call on –
Ramsey Russell: I’m going to.
Eric Patterson: At least. Yeah, you’ve got to get them to tell the Tom Reed stories, because they’re about as good as anything you’ll hear about duck hunting.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me about hunting Arkansas public land, because, like, kind of a common thread in our conversation so far has been about changing times then versus now the old guard when the Internet do and stuff like that. And I’ve heard some stories about not just Arkansas, but throughout the United States, public land crowding and always back in the day for as long as I’ve been duck hunting, if you’re going to get to the duck hole on public land, you better get up early, go hard, go long, go fast. You know what I’m saying? It’s just, it’s always been competitive because it doesn’t belong to any one body. But now you hear stories of, my goodness gracious, I’ve heard of stories of 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 and 70 people clambering to a single duck hole. I was telling my son about you and I getting up, Eric, maybe and running like the devil through the woods to get to a certain spot on public land and you flagged them off, you shined a light through the woods if you saw some other headlights coming and they went elsewhere, not no more. He said, dad, there’s zero chance on a lot of these properties we hunt today. There’s zero chance that you and 2 or 3 other guys would be hunting that by yourself, it’s just too competitive and it’s almost like the biggest crowd wins. I can’t even imagine that to and based on my experiences, I still hunt public and we still get up early. I hunted Arkansas public, not this past season, but the one before and the younger guys in their 20s and 30s were getting up at 11:00 or midnight and the older guys, like myself and the old geezers, were getting up at 02:30 or 03:00. And meeting them out there, we were getting up late at 02:30 or 03:00 in the morning to meet them out there, but I just don’t remember it being that way 25, 30 years ago. I remember sleeping in the bottom of a boat, but I just don’t remember it being the crowding and the harassment, we were recently working, as you may be aware, in Australia, dealing with a lot of their anti hunting problems and stuff like that and I posted up a thread of a radical anti hunter, if you can imagine. They are legally entitled to be within 33ft of where I’m standing in hunting duck and harassing me in Australia. And I posted up a video and said, what would you do? And of course everybody said I’d call the game warden because we got laws like that. But ironically, the first law in the United States, the first violation written with anti hunter harassment laws in the United States of America was not some radical form of anti Australian type hunter, it was a duck hunter himself.
Eric Patterson: Trying to protect the other hunters.
Ramsey Russell: Trying to get a – somebody called a game warden on somebody that showed up and was threatening them, harass them, wouldn’t leave a duck hole and that was the first anti hunting, whatever they call it, violation written in America was a duck hunter against a duck hunter. Have you ever had any run ins like it?
Eric Patterson: Yeah, I’ve got a couple things I think I’ll share that contrast the changes over the years. So 1994, that’s going way back. I’ve been out of school a few years and a friend and I decided we had seen in magazines once again, before the Internet. We’d seen in magazines that Arkansas timber was an amazing experience. So I thought, I want to try that. So my buddy and I, we drive up, we drive pretty much all night, we get to the ramp and I’m standing there, I’ve never, I mean, it’s pitch black, I’d never been there before, we’re at by Lake Ashbaugh there at Dave Dawson Black River. And I have a USGS map and that’s all I’ve got to try and figure out how to hunt that morning. And the boats start –
Ramsey Russell: There weren’t any of those apps back in the day, were there?
Changing Dynamics in Arkansas Hunting
Anyway, so that just illustrates how accommodating people were in the 90s in Arkansas before it got overrun with non-residents, I think is the way the people live, there were.
Eric Patterson: Oh, no, there was no app. Hell, you couldn’t even get aerial photographs, I mean, you had a map, that was it. So I’m standing there with a map and this guy walks by me and we’re clearly lost and I said, show him the map. I said, hey, could you, what’s the best way to get to this section right here? And he looked at me, goes, where are you from? I said, I’m from Alabama. He goes, oh, hell, anyone that comes all the way from Alabama, shoot some ducks, come with me. And he’s like, can your boat keep up with me? I’m like, yeah, I keep up with you. So I mean, we went winding through all those little twists and turns and ditches and jumping levees and ran way back in there and hunted with him, had a fantastic experience, exchanged phone numbers. He invited us back the next day, did it again and that went on for 10 years, we’d go up there – And hunt with him. Yeah. And I had a similar experience, we showed up at, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Oak Donick, it’s on St. Francis Sunken Lands management area and there was an elderly gentleman there. And we just talked to him for a minute and he’s like, well, what are you boys doing in the morning? We said, we thought we’d come out here. He goes, oh, so why don’t you come hunt with me in my blind? We had a wonderful hunt that day and hunted with him several more times and in fact, one hunt, he, at the end of the hunt, he pulled out 2 duck calls that he was friends with Thurman McCann, the Delta Mallard, pretty collectible call this day. He said, I want you boys to have these. He said, Thurman, the piano, Kimball factory. Kimball pianos are made there in Truman and he gets scraps and we give him some scraps of wood, he makes these calls. Anyway, so that just illustrates how accommodating people were in the 90s in Arkansas before it got overrun with non-residents, I think is the way the people live, there were. So let’s go to from, that was 1995, 1994, 1995, 1996 that time frame. And in 2011, I take my son and a friend of mine, he’s a colonel in the army. We decided to go hunting and we launch up there, we’re on Black River again, are you familiar with Schaefer’s Eddy access? It’s, anyway, we put in Schaefer’s and we run down. It’s a long run, it’s about 10 miles. There’s a little oxbow and we had scouted it the day before and saw some birds there. And then the far back, the oxbow, there were decoys and I was like, we showed up that morning and there was no one back there. So I said, we’re going to set up here. We’ll play the wind and the cover We were in our sneak boxes and there was some button bush. We could pull in and have a really good setup and we got set up and this guy comes rolling in and he’s cussing up a storm and he comes over there and shines a light in my face. He’s like, who the hell are you? What are you doing here? You don’t do that to another spread or another hunter. He said, don’t you see my spread down there? And he starts just railing on us. And it was, it wasn’t an adult conversation, it was this grown man chewing me out, cussing me out like I was a low life. So he goes and he had 2 or 3 groups with him, they go and they set up, he comes motoring back for a second conversation, proceeds to call me every name in the book. And it was unpleasant and he tells us we have to leave. And he’s like, go set up down there, go set up there, you’re not hunting here, this is our spot. I told Bill, I’m like, look, this is public land, we were here first, I’m not moving, kind of was getting stubborn at that point and I certainly didn’t appreciate the way the guy was talking to me with my son in front of me and Colonel Burris. So he left, he came back a third time. He goes, well, since you boys won’t move, he said, let me tell you how this is going to work. He said, you’re not going to shoot a bird all morning and he said and if your son gets hurt, it’s going to be on you. That incensed me, yeah, that incensed me, because I’m like every man is responsible for the muzzle of their gun and where the shot goes and for you to tell me that you’re going to hurt my kid and I’m responsible for it, that’s just not going to work. So at that point, I was like, bill, we’re not moving, we’re hunting. So the hunt started and we’d have birds working and they would intentionally shoot to scare them off.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Eric Patterson: And we’d hear the guy yell, that’s how we do it on Black River. And he had this real baritone thundering voice that carried. They were probably 75 yards away, something like that. And so we shot maybe one bird, they basically scared everything away. I don’t know that they were doing any good. But then some birds flew towards them and a few seconds later they shot and they were very low shots right off the deck. And my son, who’s 10 years old, 11 years old at the time, says, dad, I’m hit and I was like, oh, no. I said, look at me and I looked at his face. It didn’t penetrate the skin, but like a bee sting, you’ll little –
Ramsey Russell: Red steel, boy. If it hit an eyeball, it’d been a different story.
Eric Patterson: Oh, yeah. It would have blinded if it hit him in the eye. So I looked over to Bill. Bill’s in his boat and Thomas and I are in my boat. I said, Bill, I don’t like being bullied, but now my son’s safety is at stake and I said, we need to go. And Bill said, I totally agree. So we picked up and left and went back into town and got lunch. And Bill’s very – and he’s West Point graduate, been in the service and he kind of understands hierarchy and law and structure and how things work and he said let’s call the game warden, he said, they probably won’t do anything, but it’s a data point for them. They need to know this sort of activity is going on. I said, yeah, I agree, let’s call the game warden. So we called the game warden there at the little barbecue we were eating at and some lady answered the phone and she said, well, I’ll have the man. I’ll have someone. I’ll let him know they’ll call you and we got a phone call later that day and they said, we’re concerned about what happened and we’d like to put a stop to it. Would you be willing to go back down there tomorrow again with 2 officers undercover and you got to, well, yeah, absolutely. I was like, heck, yeah, I want to do that, but let’s stop and think about this, how many times in your life has like someone broken in your car or stolen something for you or you’ve been broken the law and you’ve been on the bad side of it and you call the cops and after they fill out a report, nothing ever happens. And I was like, this is the first time in my life to where the law is actually going to do something that happened to me. And so we went, we were in town and we went to fill up gas that night, damned if that guy who harassed us didn’t pull in the same gas station we were, so Bill ran around. Yeah, Bill ran around and got his tag. We called the game warden said, we got number for you here. We just ran into the guy, he didn’t see us. And they said, we’ll run the number. So they ran the number and I won’t mention the guy’s name because he’s deceased now and I try not to mention it. I, just for his family’s sake, I wouldn’t trash him.
Ramsey Russell: Sure.
Eric Patterson: But so when we told him the number and they looked it up, they said, that’s kind of who we thought it was. He’s got a reputation down here. So we went back the next morning and the game wardens were very coy about it, they didn’t meet us at the launch. They said, we’ll be across the river down a ways. We don’t want to be seen at the launch, we don’t want people know we’re out, people could notify or tell their buddies, hey, we saw the game warden’s, play it cool. So we launched our boats, went across the river, intercepted, they intercepted us and we motored down about 10 miles, pulled into the exact same spot where we were that previous day and waited. And sure enough, he showed up again. And this time he was with his grandson, he was just a small group, just him and one other person, I think and he comes rolling in, he sees us sitting there. And he wasn’t quite as mad as he was the day before. He said something like those blankety blanks just don’t learn a lesson. So he pulls down and the game wardens are with us and we hunt for about an hour and then they decide to go down and have a conversation with him. And they go down there and as they’re pulling down towards and they have their face mask on, they don’t want to be recognized. And he’s like, you blankety blank. Get out of my spread. I’m sick of you. He starts launching in on them, chewing them out and one of them peels their face mask back and he immediately recognizes they know the game warden is in there.
Ramsey Russell: Too late.
Eric Patterson: And this, yeah, well, this is what’s incredible about it. He starts barking orders at them to come remove me.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Eric Patterson: And my partner. Yeah, I’m like, man, that’s a guy who has a sense of entitlement unlike anything I’ve ever seen. So they go down and they talk to him, they wrote him a ticket on the spot. He had pulled camouflage material and tacked it to the trees to act as a little blind and that’s against the rules down there. So they gave him a ticket and they asked him a bunch of questions. They came back and talked to us and they asked if we would come in to the police station and fill out a formal report. So we went back to the police station and spent some time, wrote a novel, basically of everything that had occurred. And when we got done, not to brag on myself or anything, but we got done, they read our statements and the one who was the chief, he said, in my 30 years of doing this, those are the best written statements I’ve ever seen.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Eric Patterson: But he was dealing with, Bill and I would do technical writing all day long in our job. So you kind of get good about organizing facts and everything and putting together a timeline of events which helped them out. So, we left town and I got a call from the game warden and he said, so we went and we questioned all the witnesses and this guy’s own hunting partners totally validated your stories. He was charged with hunter harassment and he was arrested. So it was a good feeling knowing that the guy that had shot my kid in the face was now facing the law.
Ramsey Russell: Good.
Eric Patterson: And what they told us was they had had a problem with decoys being left on the management area overnight and that was creating a situation of squatting basically going on, people would take their decoys and if anyone else showed up, they’d say, no, our decoys are here. This is our spot, get the hell out of here and they’d use intimidation or fear fistfight or whatever to get you out of there and the state knew it was going on and they wanted a trial case or they wanted evidence that this was going on and the game wardens, when we originally called them, they felt like a father, son and a military officer was a pretty good case to bring forth to the commission. Yeah, it was brought to the commission and the commission ruled after that that the decoys could no longer be left out overnight on the management areas. So it was kind of a landmark case and I’m sure there’s people that would not be happy with me that I happened to be there. And we pursued it with the law, but I just, I felt like it was a terrible injustice.
Ownership of the Duck Hole
We got in the spread, waited it out for the rest of the day and shot our ducks.
Ramsey Russell: Oh and kid getting shot. You better believe it was the right thing to do. It reminds me, you talking about leaving decoys out. We were hunting a place public Mississippi River, a chute cutting in the river was real high on the Greenville stage, we called it broke foot hunted, it just that one season. And it was a massive roost massive, just 20,000 to 30,000, mostly mallards, were flying out twice a day to go across the river and hit the rice fields and then come back and being there at daylight wasn’t important. Being there when they started coming back was when you wanted to be there and we ended up over the course of 2 or 3 weeks, every single decoy we could beg bar steel, way more than a 15/42 job it took us several trips across the chute to pick up all this bread. But we had put out 200 or 300 big decoys, we had a massive spread. We showed up one day, well, that’s what you needed, as that roost built, the flocks were, gosh, now look, this is back in college days, this was – I can really not remember hunting in the deep south and seeing 5000 or 6000 mallards working you at one time because 100 would bring in 200 more and nothing attracts ducks like working ducks. It was just the flock would build so big you couldn’t finish nothing and it’s been a while since I saw that, but we had just a big spread out there on the edge of this roost out in the chute to attract those flocks. And one day we showed up 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, I don’t know. And there was already a boat in our decoys and we just literally sat there until they, we knew we had a few hours wait, but they give up on it and as they were leaving through my decoy spread, they got hooked up in the decoys and all they had for about me big motor, big boat, big blind. They couldn’t get out and they’re, my decoy lines, which we’re talking 15, 20 foot of line apiece had tangled up in a prop and there they are drifting down into the channel, Mississippi River channel. They had a little trolling motor, it wasn’t enough to bring them back to the bank where they could get out and fix it and I had to race out there and cut my own decoy lines and clear the prop to help them out, no big deal. We got in the spread, waited it out for the rest of the day and shot our ducks. But your story about getting in a conflict with a hunter on public land, me and the same buddy, same boat decided to hit a very popular historic WMA in the state of Mississippi that she over name hunter named for the first time and it was just a flooded break. And we didn’t know nothing about nothing. So we decided what we would do is just get out and find a spot and throw some decoys and see what was what and listen and watch and just begin to probe and explore this WMA and we had just gotten the last decoy out, had just pulled up the blind. When somebody 150, 200 yards away started shouting about whooping somebody’s ass.
Eric Patterson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Big baritone like a courtroom lawyer, booming voice.
Eric Patterson: That was the exact same voice.
Ramsey Russell: Was hollering about whooping ass and I said, is he talking to me? And we didn’t know and I had to get like peek up under the blind and look to look way up under the timber and, oh, this guy’s carrying on and on. We ain’t fired a shot, we ain’t seen a duck, as it would be, when you get off in some of these new areas, it may look like a hole, but the ducks don’t recognize it as spots. We were just sitting out there floating decoys and this guy’s yelling and all of a sudden, we hear decoys going and he’s throwing his decoys up and he’s hitting a fever pitch about whooping somebody’s ass. And my buddy’s like, what are we going to do? I said, cause I’m not, have never been a fighter. I said, I might get my ass whipped, but it ain’t going to be sitting in this boat and God knows how deep this water is and that don’t bode well at all. And there was zero chance, because he had a head start on picking it. It was zero chance, I was going to get my blind down, my decoys up, make it to the boat ramp in time to trailer off and be gone when he hit it and the whole way back to the boat ramp, I hit that bank at a fevered pitch, skid up on the bank, jumped out, shucked my waders, put on my high top reeboks and may have grabbed a broken hole handle something out of the back of the truck. And the whole way back to the boat ramp, this guy’s getting louder and louder like an approaching cannon about whooping somebody’s ass. And I meet him at the boat ramp, son and I am vibrating. I’m like, boy, I can’t believe this is happening and when we met at the boat ramp, he looked at me and goes. Introduced himself with a big broad smile and he said, what’s the problem? I said, you talking about whooping somebody’s – He said, oh, I ain’t talking to you, son, I’m talking to so and so. Little did I know on that public land there was two old timers that had a 30 year beef and they had gotten into it out there on the water. So that was one of my first experiences hunting that WMA and you see all types on public land. But he was a nice guy, it turns out to be he and I ain’t going to say we became friends because we didn’t hunt together, but we see each other ramp everything else and talk. Yeah, just a real colorful personality. But that one of my run ins and total misunderstanding, which is easy to do when somebody’s yelling across open water about whooping somebody’s butt.
Eric Patterson: Sure. It just like we talked about earlier, it seems to me, from my observations, that there’s a different attitude on public land than there used to be. And I’m not going to say it was always invitations and gifts given at the end of the hunt like I experienced, but I don’t think you had the attitude and the sense of entitlement that some hunters seem to have now or maybe put another way, the competition –
Ramsey Russell: I’m not arguing about that, because it is public land. It is not owned by an individual, it’s owned by a state or federal government. But at the same time, if you’ve been hunting spot for 2 or 3 generations, you know what I’m saying? I mean, it is, I can see the emotional connection and taking some form of emotional ownership in this duck hole.
Eric Patterson: Exactly.
Ramsey Russell: But I’ve always tried to be and cannot recall a single time that I’ve breached the trust and I’m thinking specifically of a federal property in the state of Mississippi that a boy I used to hunt with a friend took me to – And it was really, it was just a little beaver pond off in a wetland but it took about a mile of walking through the woods to get to it. And 2 or 3 of the times we went there, it was some of the memorable hunt, I shot some banded, a banded duck, great hunting. But he described to me his dad carrying him back to that spot on public land before he could even hunt, literally carrying him back on his shoulders, he had way too sluice to get back there. And I just, it never even crossed my mind to ever return without him. Because in the context of what was so memorable about that hunt and what somebody, a friend, had shared with me, it just, him being there was kind of a part of the equation. It wasn’t really about the ducks. It was about, it would have been about a breach of trust among friends to go back there and poach his spot that he showed me. It just never occurred to me to ever go back there again and now if he were to call me tomorrow and say, let’s go duck hunting, I’d probably walk it again with him, but it’s never occurred to me to go back in there and hunt it in his absence, even though it’s public land. It just don’t seem right.
Eric Patterson: Well, I understand that you kind of accept the fact that that’s the spot that he tends to like to go to and you enjoyed your time with him and you really don’t want to compete with a friend for a spot. I totally get that. One of my friends –
Ramsey Russell: Good friends and friends at all are a lot harder to come by than a place to go shoot ducks.
Eric Patterson: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: At the end of the day, what do you value most, the strap of dead ducks or a friendship?
Eric Patterson: You’re absolutely right. And I know that that comes from years of hunting and I’m sure you’re like me, you’ve transitioned over the time from it was all about, I got to get the birds, I got to be on them to now, you probably enjoy spending time with family and friends as much as you do any other part of the sport and at least that’s kind of the juncture of my hunting career. I am now the time spent with my kids, most of my hunting is done with my son and his friends and a few of the dads. And that, in and of itself, is what makes it so enjoyable. Now is the sitting around the blind and cutting up and telling stories and making jokes and in between flights of birds. It’s quite a good time.
Ramsey Russell: Eric, back in the late 90s, nearly 30 years ago, you started to build a duck boat and shared it on the Internet, it became duck boats.net, how many duck boats do you have? What kind of duck boats do you have?
Eric Patterson: I’ve, let’s see, I have 2 sneak boxes, I’m sorry, 3 sneak boxes, 2 that I built and one Tom Badrowski from Kansas, he had gotten a traditional Barnegat Bay sneak box that needed to be completed and decided that Kansas wasn’t the state to use it and my son was going hunting in Kansas and so they loaded up, brought back. That’s one that’s in the rafters that I got to complete, that’ll be a future project. Several John boats my son and I started restoring, we’d go find old sort of neglected boats and bring them back to life restoring. So we’ve got a couple, he just recently finished a War Eagle and we did another boat that we put a surface drive on a few poke boat for getting in the shallow waters and backwaters where you can’t really launch a big boat. So, I don’t know, I guess that rounds it out probably 5 or 6 boats.
Advantages of Hunting off the Poke Boat
They were absolute son of a gun misery to have to haul out to the blind where the poke boat was drafting 2 or 3 inches of water.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve got a poke boat, I haven’t used it in a long time and the main reason I got it was not so much for boating somewhere, but for layout boat I could launch it, go the other side of a duck hole or go here, go there. And I had never heard of a coffin blind when, before sporting adventures and you talk about a lot of those personalities, a lot of the people from way back in the day, 30 years ago, that emerged for the first time on some of those old chat rooms, became somebody, became industry leaders. A lot of did, but I’d never heard of that and what I learned quickly about some of these prefab coffin blinds were. They were absolute son of a gun misery to have to haul out to the blind where the poke boat was drafting 2 or 3 inches of water. And I could pal a push pole out or draft my stuff behind me and lay down in it and cover up fast grass, just like as effectively, if not more so. In fact, it was wide enough. My dog, a lot of times I’d be soaking wet, but it didn’t matter, I was wearing a raincoat and neoprene waders, I put my dog in the cockpit with me, she was covered up, too.
Eric Patterson: Oh, yeah, the poke boat. I think they may have gone out of business, they’d been bought and sold and a few other manufacturers had taken over. But that’s a 12 foot boat that weighs 22 pounds, I think 28 pounds.
Ramsey Russell: I couldn’t afford the Kevlar version that weighed even lighter, but I got the fiberglass and me and Mr. Ian bought one about the same time, the same season. And that’s why we built those 4 wheeler configurations, so we could carry our poke boat on top. We were going out to a beam filler rice field or into the marsh and we offload it and load it up with decoys, pull it out, throw the decoys out and climb in and cover up fast grass and just as hidden as could possibly be like a layout.
Eric Patterson: We use the poke boat of mine for a sled. A decoy sled.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Eric Patterson: We can throw all our shotguns, all our decoys, keep it our gunning bags, everything dry and walk into a marsh, swampy area and hold on to it. So that way, you don’t trip over stump and fall. And they are a fabulous way to transport your goods in and out of the swamp, flooded timber, stuff like that. You said you couldn’t afford one and I got lucky, I scored that thing on, I was maybe as Craigslist or whatever. I paid $325.
Ramsey Russell: No, I paid more than that for mine, but I still got it. I mean, I’ve had that thing forever and golly, man, I might be buried in it one day. I mean, I’m just, I wouldn’t part with it for nothing, even though I hadn’t used it in several years.
Eric Patterson: Yeah, you talk about the layout aspect. That’s how this whole website got kicked off, I was high school, college age and we were hunting Lake Guntersville and at the time, we had a lot of gabble on the lake. Eurasian milk oil is a food source they like and at the time, the lake was covered up with it and we’d sit on the bank or we sit on an island and them damn birds, they would skirt your decoys at 60 yards and go land in the middle. And I’d watch that time after time like there’s gadwalls –
Ramsey Russell: It is what gadwalls do.
Eric Patterson: Yeah, they call it the gadwall shuffle. I mean, I don’t know how many hours of my life was spent watching that, but it was considerable. So I got a – do you remember Duns? Yeah, Duns was –
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Eric Patterson: They had a office in Memphis and a few other and had a catalog and they sent this catalog I got in the mail and it showed the Arthur Armstrong Broadbill. And I saw that that was the first sneak box with a low deck and everything, I was like, that’s it, I can kill Gadwall on Guntersville without boat and I looked at the price and it was expensive. I was like, there’s no way as a college student, I could afford it. So I was like, let me look into it some more and I found out they made a wooden, you could buy plans for the wooden boat. And I bought the plans and I was like, no way I can build this, this is way too complicated. I mean, it’s got a bunch of parts and all kinds of angled cuts and I didn’t have the machinery to do it and then I found out, well, they have a kit. You can buy the kit. So I’m like, I’ll buy the kit, the car, the parts are all pretty cut and I’ll build that boat over the summer while I’m home from college. And so saved up my money, I saved up $800 for the kit and a $100 for shipping. So $900, it was a lot of money back then. And anyway, the kit arrived, the crate that it was packed in had gotten bust open and parts were spilled all over between Huntsville and Tonawanda, New York. So I called the owner of the company, Tom Lindheimer and explained him what happened and he said, well, you know what I told you, get a boat. If you’ll drive to my factory in Huntersville, North Carolina, I’ll give you a fiberglass boat at cost, which was $1100. So I made the trip up there over Thanksgiving break when I was a sophomore in college and got my first sneak box and hunted with it several seasons until I almost killed myself in it. They’re a great boat, but they’re not the most seaworthy boat. We got caught in some really bad waves and white caps and almost went under in it. So I was like, I’m done with this boat, I’m not going to, this won’t be my primary boat anymore. So I switched over to a John boat and that was only a couple seasons and then this is kind of the moment where everything came together for me. I met a hunter by the name of Jeff Smith, who had built a Devlin and it was a chance meeting. A mutual friend introduced us and I hunted with him one day and I got in the boat with him and I was in the boat maybe 5 minutes and I was like, this is the boat. This is the one, this is what I thought I was getting when I got the duck, when I got the Armstrong. This does everything, it’s big, it’s sea worthy. It has all these great features and I was like, but I don’t know how to build one and he said, well, I built this one. And I was like, will you teach me how to build? He’s like, I headed to Oregon, I’m moving to Oregon after hunting season’s over. So I like, darn. So I kind of tabled the whole idea. He moved to Oregon and he’s only up there about a year and year went by and he moved back to Huntersville. So I said, hey, I still want to build that boat. He’s like, okay, yeah, I’ll give you a hand with it, he was kind of real coy about it. So I ordered all the materials, the fiberglass, the marine plywood and I went by his house and showed it all the back of my truck and he goes, I guess you are going to be a boat builder and I said, well, I hope so, you’re going to help me, he’s like, yeah, I’ll help you. So he started coming over the house every day after work and we’d work on that boat every night and I got to a point where it’s kind of a funny story, Jeff was a character. You could do multiple podcasts on this guy. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met in my life. Everyone who’s met him will tell you he’s one of the most interesting people. But we were working on the boat one night and he said, I need to get you to a point where you could go on without me. I’m like, what’s going on? He goes, I got a court, I got to be at court tomorrow. I’m like, what’s going on? He’s like, I got a DUI, said I got, I think I can get out of it. Anyway, he goes to court and he’s in jail for the next 3 months after. So I was kind of on my own to finish that first boat up. He got me through the critical stages, got me going and everything. But anyway, he gets out of jail and I go pick him up and I take him out in the boat and anyway, it was a fun time having him there. He actually became my closest friend and nearly every hobby and everything that I do ties back to him. This guy had an unbelievable knowledge of many subjects, dealing with hunting and everything else under the sun. But anyway, so what happened? I think this ties back to the very beginning of our conversation, while we’re building that first boat and started getting questions and emails and stuff, that’s when we decided to put a form on the website and let it go from there and that’s when it took off.
Differences Between Hunting Chat Rooms and Modern Social Media
I went through your chat room this morning just to peek in. I hadn’t been there in a long time and it’s so different than the modern era of social media.
Ramsey Russell: I went through your chat room this morning just to peek in. I hadn’t been there in a long time and it’s so different than the modern era of social media. It’s moderated, you have to request permission to join. You have to follow a code of conduct. You have to behave yourself. And on you all’s particular chat room, it is a username, not an alias so everybody knows who you are. It’s just so much different than how mass communications evolved, on the one hand, Instagram, Facebook, whatever platform like that it’s a great way to reach the masses. But on the other hand, it really does, if I ask a rhetorical question, what’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever found while hunting? If, the algorithm, whatever that is, may or may not serve it to everybody I’m friends with, it’s like this little echo chamber that I have no control over versus going to your chat room format, ducksboat.net, it’s like going to the local coffee shop or to a men’s club at church or whatever the case may be and it’s just totally different. If I ask that question, anybody that comes through there is likely to see it. That whole community is liable to see it and birds of a feather flock together. And so it’s totally different, isn’t it? By design –
Eric Patterson: Yeah. In the early days I kind of, we were talking earlier about SPAV and that was the whole reason for the username policy, because I saw how people would get those aliases and just run with them and get nasty and I was like, I thought to myself if you were using your real name, you probably wouldn’t do that. It gives people a boldness when they can hide behind some sort of identity that’s not really them and I think it worked out. I’ve been told countless times that was the one thing I really liked about when I joined this place, was that everyone used their own names and it gives a sense of community and it really is a community.
Ramsey Russell: It’s a community. And I’ve seen groups like that try to convert to social media on Facebook or whatever and it just doesn’t work. It just does not work at all.
Eric Patterson: No, Facebook, when we relaunched the website back in December, there were people who said, why don’t you just take it over to Facebook and start a group there? And then you don’t have to worry about the maintenance and the cost, Facebook does that for free. But one of the things that’s really important to me about the site is what’s in the archives, I put together that launch video. You may have seen it. I had to go through, I started looking at the pictures that were on our server. There were over 40,000 pictures of people posted over the years, everything from building boats to carving decoys to friends and hunting and everything under the sun. I’m like, I don’t want to lose the history of the site and not only that, but there’s a lot of amazing builds that people have done over the years. If you’ve ever followed Stephen Jay Sanford, the guy’s a wizard when it comes to building boats and equal, anything that man touches is artwork when he’s done with it. But I was like, I’m not going to give that up. We’ve got to find a way to transfer what’s in our archives that’s searchable. Anyone who has a question about like, should I use marine plywood? Can I use Doug fir or something like that? They can go and search and they can come up with long dialogues that’ll discuss the pros and cons and if we’ve gone to Facebook, you give all that up. Have you ever tried to search Facebook for? –
Ramsey Russell: Oh, it’s impossible. I can’t do it.
Eric Patterson: No, it’s by design. They don’t want you to find information. They want a continual flow of new people and new topics, new conversations and I had a friend who described it really well. He said, participating on a group and Facebook with information about how to do something, make something, build something, repair something. He said, that’s kind of like writing a book with post it notes.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, man, that’s a perfect.
Eric Patterson: It’s not organized. It’s not searchable. You can’t find what you’re looking for. And I just was like, the forums have that in spades and the modern social media we’re both on Instagram and I really enjoy Instagram. There’s a lot of great stuff on Instagram. You meet a lot of neat people. You see a lot of cool videos and pictures, but there’s not much dialogue on Instagram. It would be things are kind of momentary, anything you put out there, it’s here today and gone tomorrow. And I’m like, the forums still offer that better than the new social media and I’ll give you an example. My son was working on his truck. He was a senior in college a year or so ago and he had some problem and he said, I went looking to try and find out what was going on my truck and he said the only place I could find answers and information about my truck were on these old forms.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Eric Patterson: And I’m like, yeah, that’s where that information lives and one of the things that I think we’ve done that kind of separate us from other forums is we’ve stayed non commercial. If you notice, there were no ads, there were no banners, there’s nothing. It really is a community supported by the community. Anytime we have bills to pay, I’ll say, hey, guys, accounts getting a little low and ISP wants their money and I’m not kidding, within 24 hours, I’ve got enough money to run the site for 2 years. It takes very little effort to keep it from other people when they donate the money to keep it going, it makes my life easy.
Ramsey Russell: Old school, man. That is such an old school way of doing things.
Eric Patterson: Yeah, pass the hat. It’s like, hey, we need, we got to pay light bill, pass the hat and it gets paid very quickly. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck with it, because of the support I have. I’ve told other people, I’m like with forums dropping off every, there’s only, I guess, a handful left. I’m like, I’m going to be the last man standing. If this community continues to support and covers the bills, I’ll do the work and we’ll see. I hope they persist on longer, I hope we’re not the end of it.
Ramsey Russell: Last, well, I’m seeing a research. See, that’s what I’m saying in your website is I am seeing a resurgence in different topics like this and I still may search for a topic on Google and some of those old chat rooms that are still around come up. But topics that were 20 or 30 years old we’re whatever, dozens of people commented around this one topic on something that I was searching for. It’ll come up to them old chat rooms and it does archive it. Facebook doesn’t come up like that, social media doesn’t come up like that because, like you say, it’s a book written with post it notes, which is about as accurate as scripting I’ve ever heard. Here’s the last question I want to ask you homemade stuff, do it yourself. Have you seen that or do you got a sense of how that’s transitioned? Because to me, when I think back to duck blinds and duck boats and whatever, like we started off talking about, we all made stuff, I don’t see that anymore. You know what I’m saying? It’s all consumer credit is readily available and it’s almost like if they wanted to just go buy it from a company that’s propped up since and we’re all just mass consumers. It seems like instead of this old ethos of just making it because it fits our style. But do you see, do you have a feel with duckboats.net and the community you’ve built and had around for 30 years now? Do you still sense that there’s still a lot of that going on?
Eric Patterson: There is in pockets, I think it’s a numbers game. You take, what have we got? A million duck hunters?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Thereabout.
Eric Patterson: And less than 1%, let’s say 1/10th of 1%, what would that be? 10,000 duck hunters out there enjoy hands on doing stuff with their, themselves in their workshops and they extend their season by working on boats or decoys or whatever it is that they want to, designing blinds, building duck blinds, so forth and they find some of those guys will find their way to my site because there’s a lot of that going on. But by and large, I think you’re right, most of the most duck hunters today, more so than in the past. It used to be out of necessity, now people seem to have more disposable income or more lending abilities and social media is a tremendous marketing machine. My gosh, I mean, you’re in the industry and other people in the industry and they have good livings or supplement their normal jobs by providing goods and services that people find on social media. So I can kind of see both sides of it. It’s a big industry that serves a purpose, but yet there’s a little bit of more these days of people just wanting to buy it and have it versus actually making it themselves.
Ramsey Russell: And I’m just not up, I think about homemade and to think about handcrafted the things, I think that that has always permeated waterfowls especially. But really and truly I’m not a disposable guy. I despise disposable anything, I’ll wear a watch till it just, I can’t make it run no more. I’ll shoot a shotgun until it just won’t shoot, even though they’re inanimate objects, I become attached to them, they’re mine, I like them, it works.
Eric Patterson: Yes.
Ramsey Russell: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I do not like disposable anything.
Eric Patterson: Yeah. I’m with you –
Ramsey Russell: Go look at my closet, man. I mean, everything I own, I’ve had for a long time, everything I wear.
Eric Patterson: What I found is when you take the time to make yourself, you want to hang on to it and you take more pride out of it when you’re using it. Early on, when I built the first boat, I kind of came up with this saying, sort of captured what we were doing. I was like, you stand out at the launch and you disappear in the marsh and you’d show up at the boat launch and you’d have a boat and people walk up, man, that’s cool, where’d you get that? And you’d have the pride of saying, I made it. They’re like, no way. Yeah, I made that, people just, it kind of blew them away that you could actually take some woods and plywood and fiberglass and so forth and make something that was that usable, but yet get out and hunt with it and just completely disappear with it camoed up and they’re very effective. So and once you experience that, it kind of makes you want to do it more. You want to build another boat, you want to design your equipment. I did a quickly, I did a little project this fall. It’s the simple, most utilitarian thing is a pole with a hook on it to pick your decoys up out of the boat. And so I looked around at some old style that had been used by in the sailboats what people use for grappling hooks, grapples for getting lines out of the water, stuff like that and I stumbled across a really neat design for decoy. So we put together a little Instagram story about how we made it. I mean, it was very amateurish the way we did it, that thing has gotten so many views, people love to see other people make stuff.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Eric Patterson: And at some point, it catches on to where they want to try it themselves. But what I do see is a big opening and I wish I had a cameraman, because the things that go on here at the shop are probably video gold. If I had the time to and the wherewithal to get video.
Ramsey Russell: They make iPhones now.
Eric Patterson: I know. Well, I’m the type, I love having a friend who comes over and he runs the video for me because I can just use my hands and not be bothered with stopping the – am I getting good video? But people certainly like seeing it and like you were saying, the customizations, there’s some things you just can’t go and buy. And when you get a handmade item that’s tailored for specific tasks, people do like that. So there is, if someone wanted to make a business or supplement. There is, I believe there’s a market for this handmade stuff. So, I mean, you know that with the decoys.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Eric Patterson: The well-known carvers they’re selling decoys, people are buying them. There is a market for this stuff that’s made out of our shops.
Ramsey Russell: Eric, I enjoyed our conversation this morning, thank you very much for coming on board. Tell everybody what they’ve heard, we’ve said it a million times, but your website is duckboats.net, climb back into an OG community, shrug off the algorithms, meet people like yourself that value generational, homemade things, not necessarily consumer items that are disposable, but it’s not just duck boats and duck artifacts, what you find out is there’s all kinds of topics that emerge, it may be old trucks, it may be looking for something new. It could be anything under the sun that you go to the coffee shop and talk about with all the locals. Am I right?
Eric Patterson: You’re absolutely right. You’ve encapsulated it quite nicely and I want to say I really appreciate the attention. Our community has kind of flown well below the radar for a long time and it means the world to me. Someone of your stature and your prominence to bring us and shine a little bit light on us, that’s a very special thing you’ve done and I really mean, I appreciate it. Quite a deal.
Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Eric. Folks, you all go check out duckboats.net, I promise you won’t regret it and thank you all, thank you, Eric. But thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, see you next time.
