EP 519. Pitboss Waterfowl

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO ‘s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today we’re going to go all the way over to Havre de Grace, Maryland and visit with a longtime friend, a long time – I ain’t going to say hero, but I’ve known this guy a long time, always greatly respected his place, what he does in the world of waterfowling, Jeff Coats, AKA The Pitboss, one and only, Jeff, how the heck are you?

Jeff Coats: It’s a pleasure, man. Thank you very much, you’re way too kind to me and we are just outside Ocean City, Maryland, I was born in Havre de Grace, but we’re outside Ocean City, Maryland right now in Whaleyville, Maryland, so sitting here, Pitboss World Headquarters, PBHQ is not 100% complete, but time and money, money and time, we’re going to get it done one day.

Ramsey Russell: Time and money, man. It makes the world go round, I know you and like so many people in my world, it seems like not everybody, by no means, but a lot of people go back to either a small Mississippi chat room called MS Ducks or the much larger national for sure international almost refuge forms and I knew you, that was a chat room for all you youngsters listening that are all up in social media, Snapchat, it ain’t the same, it really just ain’t the same, you get these threads, you start talking, people start telling stories, sharing pictures and we knew each other and I ended up Jeff back in the day on a – I was with the federal government at the time, I took a detail out in DC and there was a little something going on at Havre de Grace, a waterfowl festival or something and the first person I walk up to and just see is Jeff Coats selling decoys, man.

Jeff Coats: It was –

Ramsey Russell: And I got to shake your hand.

Jeff Coats: I remember that well, that was the duck fair, they don’t have the duck fair anymore at the museum. The 2 big shows in with the Decoy Museum or the May Waterfowl festival and then they had a little weekend show, October Suck festival and that’s actually was still in September because of September teal, but it was in that late, hurricanes would affect it, that late season weather. But anyway, yeah, I do remember that probably would have been in like 90, I don’t know, 90s, 98, 99, somewhere in there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’d say probably about 99, I’m pretty sure it was 99. That’s how long ago it was and we hatched a plan because I was working on detail up there, but you better believe I have my shotgun and rifle and 4 wheel drive and even up and out up in that part of the world and we had to plan to go to go teal hunting and you remember that?

Jeff Coats: I do. We were going to be down on the lower Nanticoke River on the easter shore and yeah, it was so it was not – that’s why I corrected myself, it was not October, it would have been September, that year was the duck fair.

Ramsey Russell: September. And I just remember driving over and finally finding a license, I couldn’t believe how hard it was for me to find a license and stamp in Havre de Grace, of course I went from around there, didn’t know where to go, but where I went had one and I got a hotel and woke up the next morning well after daylight had overslept, was terribly freaking embarrassed. I mean I couldn’t have been no more embarrassed, oh my gosh, I slept in Pitboss and then I hope you didn’t kill none without me and I called you up, you sleeping too, because the power had gone off.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, had some a good thunderstorms come across there so technology was not what it is today back then as far as phones and all that kind of thing, huh?

Ramsey Russell: No, I wouldn’t have slept in if the phone had gone off. That was just good old fashioned alarm clock plugged into the wall. Man, how times have changed since then, isn’t that something else?

Jeff Coats: We get older every day.

Ramsey Russell: Jeff, talk about this, as long as I’ve known you, I still don’t know a lot of a lot about your origins and your growing up other than the fact you grew up right there in the epicenter of it all, right there around Havre de Grace, what was it like growing up around Havre de Grace, Maryland? And just for anybody listening that ain’t never heard of it, elaborate on the significance of Havre de Grace in the world of duck hunting.

Jeff Coats: All right, so I was born in Havre de Grace and actually lived in a little town just up the river, Susquehanna River as it goes on to the northwest there off the flats, town of Darlington where my mom was raised, born and raised and then we moved a little bit more into the county, so actually most of my stuff I growing up as a kid was in Fountain Green. But no, man, I mean if you Susquehanna flats, market gunning sink boxes, I mean that’s where it all took place and current day body booting, but definitely sink boxes, that was the punt guns, the battery guns, really till about what 1935, 1937, somewhere in there.

Ramsey Russell: It was the absolute epicenter of it all, market hunting, that was a big deal and kind of where Havre de Grace flew up on my radar was one of the decoy carvers around there, the decoy carvers that was way back when I just bought plastic decoys and nothing else and didn’t know much about that kind of stuff Jeff, I actually went hunting over, I don’t know, around Chestertown, Maryland which is a pretty good way I guess from Havre de Grace and fell in with a guy and named Mike McBride we went hunting and he showed me, heading nearby, he had some decoys, some wooden decoys and they were rigged. I said you hunt over these goes? Oh yeah man, my daddy and I bought those for 5 bucks back in the day, he’s about my age, so it had been back when he was a kid and he described he can remember when all the old men in his camp were burning the wood decoys and stringing the plastics, millions of dollars, thousands of decoys just burned, history gone. But nobody appreciated it back then because they were dime a dozen, grew on trees around Havre de Grace and as I learned more there was and is still a tremendous amount of decoy carving heritage, I mean some of the biggest names I’ve ever heard, who would be some of the decor carvers around that part of world?

Jeff Coats: Well, I mean it just depends on, you mean current days or just –

Ramsey Russell: Back in the old days and current.

Jeff Coats: Well, I mean probably the most, one of the prolific carvers would be our Madison Mitchell.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah. Madison Mitchell, that’s right.

Jeff Coats: Yep. Late 20s and he lived to be 93, so 1993 or so, he lived to. But I mean there’s before him, I mean you’ve got, as you’re sitting there talking about the history of things, there’s a – I still don’t own one of them but there’s a fella, there was a bunch of dyes, D Y E but Captain Ben Dye, he makes a really badass redhead, but really what it is his redheads were gunned over during the Civil War and that’s kind of making in – they’re 1863, 65, 68, that’s when he was making decoys. So there’s names of people, so there we go and more current day, so the off of Madison Mitchell, you’re going to have the Pierce, you’re going to have Speed Joiner, Charlie Joiner, you’re going to have Charlie Bryan, you’re going to have Harry Jobes, Pat Vicenti, Bill Collins and then then there’s a younger group of, specifically from Harry Jobes his 3 sons carves, so you got Charlie, Bobby, excuse me, Bobby, Charlie and Joey. And there’s – it’s kind of a dying art, I mean, there’s not as many people doing it today, I was the honorary chairman of the festival, actually, it didn’t happen during COVID so it was the following year and I mean, I remember when the show, that was the show in Havre de Grace, man, the whole town got involved with it. It was a weekend show and it was involved the high school, the middle school and the museum itself, the little Main Street, it’s not Main Street, Washington Street, but kind of is Main Street in Havre de Grace that was closed down and today, I mean, the May show still goes on, the Decoy Festival, but it’s just a fraction of what it was. I was on the board of directors there for a couple years and one year we lost 7 vendors to death. That they just, they happened to pass away in that years time, so my point in saying that is it’s definitely an older age crowd, that is the vendors and the participants and the carvers like I said, man, each day we get older. So, there’s not – doesn’t really seem to be a newer, younger generation that’s kind of taken over the tradition if you will.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s amazing. We actually met with Mr. Joiner not too long ago and while I was over there and then down the bank, you’ve got the Ward brothers, who, Holy cow, that was, I mean, the decoy carving history in that part of the world is something else. Jeff, when you grew up duck hunting as a young guy, when you just grew up in that part of the world, I mean, were you aware of all these people? Were you aware of that, cultural surroundings and traditions and stuff or were you, it’s just kind of, it’s so normal, you just take it for granted?

Jeff Coats: I have to say, like, I did not go, I did not shoot my first duck till I was 23 years old. So I will say, when I was younger, no, I was not aware of that, I wanted to – I’ll play high school football, I’m going to play major college football, I wanted to be in the NFL, I wanted to drag race to do all those kind of things and it was not necessarily, specifically decoy carving and the heritage in history that’s in, it was definitely not on my radar.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you started duck hunting when you were 23 years old, how’d they get started?

Jeff Coats: Well, I actually tried to turkey hunt a season or 2 before that and when I guess I had to get a real job and worked as civil engineer and there’s one fellow that became a very good friend, he sat in front of me as far where our desks were lined up, all he did was talk about duck hunting, he never went turkey hunting and I never went duck hunting. So I took him spring turkey hunting and that fall he took me duck hunting and pretty much I was hooked ever since.

Ramsey Russell: What did you all duck hunt, Jeff? I mean, were you all out there on the base shooting scoters and sea ducks, divers or things –

Jeff Coats: So, like, we’re Harford County in Havre de Grace. We drove, you mentioned the Ward brothers down towards Crisfield, Maryland, which was a good, that’s a good 3, 3 and a quarter hours drive, so we’d get up, we’d leave at 11:00 pm, get to Easton, stop at Denny’s, get food and keep on trucking down, it was public hunting, so we’d be in the water by 03:30 in the morning and on these impoundments that were down that way and go out there and kind of claim our spot and it was more of, I enjoyed the duck hunting, but it was also more the adventure of duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: Taking a big trip and 3 and a half hours, you say it’s a big trip, it’s all relative, but again, it was at that age that was something really cool to do.

Ramsey Russell: Yep, when did you, I’m assuming when you all first got started, you were young like myself and were probably tossing plastic decoys, whatever you get your hands on, when did the Havre de Grace, the regional culture catch up with you as a duck hunter? Because now I know you use carved decoys.

Jeff Coats: 100%.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. When did that transition? What was the revelation that you go screw all this plastic stuff, I’m going real deal.

Jeff Coats: Well, I can look up my shelf here and see there’s 4 blue wing teal that are in pretty poor shape, but those were from 1992, so that’s the first. My first duck hunt would have been in 1988, the 88, 89 season and those, the teal that are above my head are from 92, so I guess it didn’t take me that long to wanted to get into something else or something you could do in the off season, but when I hear, let’s rewind for a second, when I – the first duck season and guys locally here will think I’m joking around with them, but my first duck hunt that year, it was in Atlantic Flyway it was a 30 day season, 3 bird limit, but sea ducks was 107 days, 7 bird limit, but the actual regular ducks were, it was only a 30 day season, 3 bird limit.

Ramsey Russell: I remember those days.

Jeff Coats: You didn’t really have that much opportunity to go, campus back for closed then, lots changed both ways since from then till now, but again –

Ramsey Russell: Canada goose was closed then probably, I know they had a big moratorium, they had a 5 year moratorium on the canvasbacks and then nationwide and then for the longest time around that era, you could not shoot Canada geese there was a Canada goose closure up there for a while.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, that AP Canada goose, the Ungava Peninsula goose, it was a good 5 years and if I had to guess, I would say maybe like 90, 94 –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, okay.

Jeff Coats: 93, 94, closed somewhere in there. But yeah, like it was just the get back with the decoys was just something I could do in the off season, then the competitiveness in me, I don’t know how much there is in me, but whatever there’s in me all of a sudden there’s some decoy contest, so let’s try to carve a decoy and let’s see if we can go get go stack up against everybody else, maybe we’ll win a ribbon kind of thing and that’s my first decoy contest, we’re at the Havre de Grace, the decoy festival in May.

Ramsey Russell: How long have you been carving at that point?

Jeff Coats: Not long and it shows or shows today. I can remember just going down there was the rig bird, I was like, man, because I was making one of this and one of that, I never really made multiple birds and they had a rig contest on Sunday morning and it was black duck, so I’m like, man, that’s got to be easy to paint, right? A black duck versus trying to paint a pintail or something else, right? So I thought I could pull off a black duck and I went down there with my chest all puffed out and just I’m here to kick some ass and win and I did not fare very well. But from that very first time met some really good friends, people that became good friends and one of them is George Williams and he’s real – I got to credit him with some other people, but I definitely got to credit him with helping me expand and become a better decoy carver.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I think it says a lot that you went out there, I always wished what little carving I did back in the day, I wish I had felt, I just wish I had been that confident to go and enter something, not that I’d have won, I would not have, I make terrible decoys but at the same time, I think being around those people, I think it would have inspired me, I think that I would have compared mine to theirs and started looking at some of the techniques and maybe help me evolve that a little bit better and I never did, it fool the ducks and that’s all that really mattered. I went out with a terrible looking set of decoys one time and kill some ducks over and that was all she wrote, if it was to a duck, it was good enough for me.

Building a Legacy in Decoy Carving and Painting.

Like how cool would be to make something that we can throw in the water that ducks will come to and we can shoot them and it’s kind of all just compounded and it’s because that was many years ago.

Jeff Coats: Well and that was the other aspect of this too. Like how cool would be to make something that we can throw in the water that ducks will come to and we can shoot them and it’s kind of all just compounded and it’s because that was many years ago, but I have fond memories that I first decoy contest, my quick little story would be I’m there, I’m the new guy that ever, I can obviously see everybody knows everybody much like these contests and competitions, whether it be calling or dogs or whatever you’re competing in, I guess you definitely know the other people that are entered and this older fellow comes walking over to him after it was over, he comes walking over to me, I didn’t ask him or say a word to him and he just went on to tell me what was wrong with all my black ducks, pointing out this and that, we don’t do this and this, that and Sandy and Bob came over and they just kind of put their arm around me and say, don’t you walk me away from, don’t mind him, that’s just George Williams, he doesn’t know any better and George has become, I saw him over the weekend, he’s become a very dear friend and again, he’s definitely one of the names that I owe credit to helping me become a better carver and more of a better painter.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I wonder what it was, Jeff, I mean, 4, 5, 6 years into it. What do you think? You’re a duck hunter, you’re killing ducks or whatever you were throwing at the time, whether it was pop bottles or plastic decoys, flambeau, what do you think it was that just that made you want to make those decoys? Because you don’t know what it feels like to kill birds over your own decoys until you’ve done it. But I mean, there’s something, I felt the same way, I don’t know what made me do it, except that I just wanted to do it.

Jeff Coats: Yeah. I mean, the joke goes between Karen and I, Karen’s from Australia and the joke goes is that, I was like, well, Karen, I’m from Havre de Grace like I have to carve decoys kind of thing, I was born Havre de Grace and her line is her comeback is, well, I’m from Australia and that doesn’t mean I need to box kangaroos.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy, she’s a clever one, I’m glad my wife ain’t from Australia, she’d be smarter than I am. Hey, so when you grew up doing all those puddle ducks, making black ducks, things that nature, when was it that the Bay called to you? Where was along your timeline that the big water called to you? That’s a whole another game getting out there on that Chesapeake Bay, that’s big water. That’s a lot different than hunting those sloughs and marshes around Havre de Grace rivers up, river and stuff.

Jeff Coats: 100%, really right from the beginning. And as this, like, the trip progressed, like I said 3 and a half hours to get down there or so, well, heck, if I’m going to drive down there, I might as well get a hotel and spend the night and it just kind of progressed where all of a sudden, I’m hunting public property and all the like little shallow, skinny water places inside. Well, at the boat ramp you could make, you could go right or you could go left, well, left took you out to the big water, so I kind of, each time like, I’d travel just a little bit further, go down the shoreline a little bit more and really all I ever saw out there in the beginning were bufflehead, but I was like, you know what? I want to make some V boards, made some buffalo head V boards and sit there shoot a bufflehead or 2. And it just kind of progressed, so really right from the get go, the seed was planted of like, hey, what else is there here to do? What else can we do? And I had sea duck hunted again, like I told you in the beginning there, the regular duck season was much shorter than the special sea duck season, so all of a sudden, hey, let’s go down to the Bay Bridge on the east on Kent Island side of Eastern Shore and those last couple of days, let’s go out on white work boat and let’s go shoot some sea ducks. So that was my first sea duck hunting experience and then as far as actually doing it on my own or doing it with somebody, there’s a man, Donald Hughes and you talked about the refuge, Donald was way back when, he called it Spavi, but sporting adventures, right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: If he was with us today, he would say, well, that’s the really, the first place online that everyone talked waterfowl, it’s just a little, Spavi was sporting adventures –

Ramsey Russell: Yep. SPAV, we called it.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, but he called it Spavi, but there was this little waterfowl section, so that’s where he met lots, he met Hoosier Jim, he met quite a few of these older guys that were tech set, for that time in 1995 plus, I mean, these guys were like tech savvy, they had foresight, they were doing stuff on the – I had no idea what World Wide Web was in a computer and just they were definitely – Donald specifically was definitely way ahead of his time. But, where am I going with this story, somewhere along the way, I started to play around, got on a computer, started to play around and instead of Google, it was AltaVista, that was a search engine. So, I was typing in Maryland waterfowl again, I didn’t know, how does this all work, so I started typing stuff in and here comes this, Donald’s daily deeds. Basically, Donald was Dorchester County and the town of Cambridge is, if you were looking on a map, somewhere in there, he was not, he was just up a little bit to the northeast there from Cambridge. But basically, I emailed him and at the time I was going in a drive over to Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware, right above Dover and I would go shoot snow geese, to let you on the refuge and shoot snow geese, people laugh at this. The first time I shot snow geese and again, this is when the Canada goose season was closed, the snow goose limit was 4 birds.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: So, I’m in the refuge shooting my shoot my 4 birds for a season or 2 before Donald and I actually met. Excuse me and so anyway email led to phone call kind of thing and he’s like, hey, man and I told him about Bombay Hook and he used to always go in there, but he physically just couldn’t get in there anymore, had some heart attacks and he just physically was, it was not safe for him to go alone and if you don’t know, the Delaware Bay tide is much larger and more aggressive than what the Chesapeake Bay tide is. Chesapeake Bay, man, if we get, yeah, with a storm and moons and things yet it does, you will get a good rise and fall, but I’d say generally it’s a 2, 3 foot tide change shoot, man, on the Delaware Bay, it’s a 8 to 10 foot tide change. So you get over there in that marsh where you got a lot of water and if you’re not paying attention, all of a sudden you’re in mud that you can’t, your boat’s in mud that you can’t walk in until the tide comes back, I learned my lesson one time that way. But anyway, let’s speed this up, Donald just said, hey, man, if you’ll take me into Bombay Hook with you, he says, I’ll let you hunt anywhere, he had all these places set up, he said, I’ll let you hunt anywhere that I have. So we met in July, he showed me all his places and basically Donald also was a blogger before people were really doing that, on his webpage, he had it set up, a little map and he showed you all the different places, Hardscrabble and Herlock and Route 200 and Uncle Andy’s and he kind of set you up that you had a little map so you could kind of get a visual of like or at least in your mind where he’s at and unless it was raining, he hunted every day and that was like from September 1^st and back then, snow goose closed March 10^th so it was no special conservation season, but snow geese were open till March 10^th. And again, unless it was raining, he had a place set up, field set up, had some water spots set up that all he had to do was just show up because the decoy’s wrap and that’s the way he hunted and he just, he taught me a tremendous amount and he used to say it was like useless knowledge that he was full of, but, man, I really appreciated his quote, useless knowledge because honestly, Ramsey, if I didn’t meet him in 1995, 96 I wouldn’t be talking right now, that’s the kind of impact that he had on me. He was very giving with his knowledge and he just showed me and told me everything like he didn’t, there was no secrets and he just, do this, that, the other, do this that, the other, go here, go there, try this, try that.

Ramsey Russell: Sounds like he almost adopted you, like a son or grandson.

Jeff Coats: I was just going to tell you, his wife would say that that’s kind of what happened because he had 3 daughters that really didn’t hunt and she’s like, yeah, you’re the son he never had kind of thing.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, man, what a great story. What is a favorite hunt you shared with him?

Jeff Coats: Oh, man, there’s a couple good ones I can remember, like just going back into like the first couple that we went back into the refuge, he had a very small boat, I had a Jon boat with a Go Devil and a blind on it, so we’d kind of use both boats, get all the decoys out and hit a hop in and we had some really good hunts in the refuge, there was a fellow and again from the refuge – No, the Bombay Hook Refuge, excuse me, but the web page, the refuge, duckhunter.net, there was another gentleman, Bill De George, from just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and one memorable hunt that both of these guys were on, there was a club that was just outside, so I’m riding in the refuge, going to the refuge, Bombay Hook and you’re going in and it’s just agricultural fields, you can see there’s pits set up and again, Canada goose was closed, but you can see all these snow goose rigs set up or people hunting snow goose. So anyway, kind of figured out in and around, I joined a club for a little while, I left that club, but he would still rent your pits by the day, $100 and I had all the decoys, so –

Ramsey Russell: $100, to rent a pit for the day.

Jeff Coats: 100%.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, is that still that cheap?

Jeff Coats: No. So, Bill again, through all this Bill’s like, hey, man, I had the decoys, Bill says, I’ll pay the pit and Donald’s like, hey, man, I’ll meet you guys there. So we went there and like, in a good day on that, the pits were very same kind of fields and that the club was on very close and like honestly, a good day if you shot for the pit, if you shot 4 snows, 5, maybe 10 snow geese that decoyed, they were generally all great birds, but that was like a great day and for whatever the reason was, it was a very warm day, I can remember, but it was super windy and we shot 42 decoying snow geese and Bill De George thought that was the freaking greatest thing in the world and he’s like, hey, I’ll go, let’s go again tomorrow, like, well I’ll pay the pit again, like, man, you’re ruined, this was not, this was the worst hunt for you to be on for your first snow goose hunt, because that’s not the way that it is here, again, like 4 or 5 birds would have been great, not 42 and so that was one hunt, but the specific hunt, the first hunt in September, back in 96 with Donald, it was September 1^st, we’re going to shoot snow geese in Delaware, I’m sorry, not snow geese, excuse me, the early Canada geese in Delaware and I never met Bill before, but he’s like, hey, man, this is Bill De George, you guys go walk on out there and he’s like, if there’s any geese, if there’s geese out, it was, okay, let me back up, I am sorry, walk out to this pond, that was kind of a pond where they would take sand from, it wasn’t really necessarily a gravel pit, but they had taken sand out, so there’s some sand bars and it was water, so Donald had it all set up, he loved to mount his own Canada geese, so he called them mounts.

 

Ramsey Russell: Stuffers.

Jeff Coats: Every county, but he took offense, they always called him mounts, so he would correct people when he said, if you call it a stuffers, he’s like, it’s called, it’s a mounted bird. But anyway, every goose that we shot, he would skin and freeze the skin, he’d eat the goose, too, but save the skin and in the spring, he would start mounting more decoys. But anyway, he says he was a little slow, he says, you guys go out there to the blind, I think Donald actually, this would have been like on the 2^nd or 3^rd, because this was my 1^st day there, but they had already hunted it once. So he’s like, if you go out there and you see a bird, go ahead and shoot it. So we get out there, Bill and I get situated, they kind of put me in the middle, Donald finally came out and he’s like, I told you to shoot any geese that were there and we were like, look, they’re all mounted birds, we’re like, there was a bird, it was actually a live goose out there sleeping on the sandbar, so they’re like, Jeff, shoot it, I was like, man, it’s sitting on the, just kind of swimming by, I’m not going to shoot it. And by the time they talked me into it, it was kind of really Bill’s shot to my left, it was his shot, so he did and it was a banded Canada goose.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Jeff Coats: Like, there we go, missed my chance at a band. But sadly, we’re all going to pass away, but Bill passed away and his wife emailed us hey, is there anything of Bill’s you would want? I got some stuff for sale, too and I kind of research after, I was like, hey, if you could find this Canada goose band, it was the very first time I met him, it was the bird they wanted me to shoot that I didn’t shoot, Bill shot it, it was banded, so she found the band, a certificate and she gave it to me.

Ramsey Russell: What a great story, man.

Jeff Coats: Memorable one. But that man did a lot with Donald, he was always, again, he was down to hunt every day and I have lots of lots of good memories, he was the first person that we shot sea ducks, if you want to stay on my own, it was with him.

Ramsey Russell: How many stuffers slash taxidermy duck did Donald have and were they, I mean, how much detail did he put into him as compared to a run of the mill stuffer?

Jeff Coats: Well, he would put big blue marbles in for their eyes.

Ramsey Russell: Blue eyed Canada geese, you blue eyed devil.

Jeff Coats: He would do that, so that his were easily identifiable in the field. But now he actually did, he did a fair amount of detail on them. I tried doing some snow geese myself and I had a few of them and basically the mouse, mice got to him and that was his biggest problem too was mice, way out in the shop to my left, there’s at least 6 or 7 brant that he mounted for me way back in the day and they still look to this day, they got to be 25, 26, 27 years old.

Ramsey Russell: Can you put them under glass or something to keep the mice out? I mean I’d have to go, I’d want one of those for posterity, that’s amazing.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, mothballs, got mothballs around, seems to keep them away and actually I still have. He mounted a bunch of things for me and again over the years the mice in my old shop, they did not last very well, but kind of way over out in front of me here, there, I still have 2 pintail that he mounted on boards for field decoys. But he would have upwards to 200 of them and again like that because of his physical, what would you say? Limitations, like –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I mean as you get older your mobility becomes a little more limited.

Jeff Coats: But these, he would leave his mounted birds out in the field and again when they opened Canada goose up, when it was from being the moratorium to the first time, it was only a 30 day season, so they didn’t stay out very long. But, he didn’t really, he says, he had the attitude of like, hey man, we’re going to shoot more geese, excuse me, I’m trying to get over a bit of a cold, we’re going to shoot more geese, the foam bodies are still good, I’ll pull the old an older body off, we’ll put a new one on and be good to go. I was kind of working in a wood shop refinishing furniture in my transitional years of life, meaning that from my first marriage to where I am today. But he just told me, man, get as much plywood as you can, so I cut the plywood bases out for him all the time and I would give him, if I had 100 bucks here buy some bodies or buy your neck material or buy your wire and I bought a bunch myself, honestly, to try to do what he showed me and eventually I was like, you know what you’re better at than me, I’ll give you all the stuff I got and have at it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic. I’ve hunted over those kinds of decoys before mallards, Canada geese and they work and of course in some of the 2^nd, 3^rd world countries we hunt in, they just use dead ducks, the dead ducks are it and those guys will go out and stick a little stick put the head up on it where it stands up and it works gangbusters. It’s something about that real feather shine or something that I think the ducks can tell the difference, the waterfowl can tell the difference between that and any decoy out there.

Jeff Coats: I mean, its real feathers, right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: That’s what it is. If I can just talk about Donald just a little bit more, too.

Ramsey Russell: Please.

Ramsey Russell: He taught me what the Internet was and he is the one – so after that snow goose hunt that we did, that we took Bill De George, he planted the seed, like, hey, man, you would be a great guide, he’s like, you got personality –

Ramsey Russell: That was your influence, Donald.

Jeff Coats: 100%. He’s the one, again, I told you, if I didn’t meet him, man, you would not know me the way that you think you know me, that kind of thing. He’s one, hey, man, you should really, you should think about that, the way you handled all this, this was like, this is what you should do. And I was like and again, I’d kind of in transition from first marriage and I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do and we had a family business that was more on her side than mine, so I kind of was the odd guy out and basically, like the whole guide thing just kind of became hey and I, to this day, I say it all the time, we did a trade show at Maryland outdoors festival over the weekend, a couple people came up and asked me, why do I guide, because I didn’t want a real job, I had a real job, I worked and did what I thought I was supposed to be doing and it didn’t really all work out for me the way that I thought that it would, so let’s give this a try.

Ramsey Russell: So, people have asked you why you guide?

Jeff Coats: And I said, because I didn’t want a real job.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I mean, that’s kind of obvious, but it is a real job, everybody wants to be a duck guide till it’s time to do real duck guide shit, you know what I’m saying? And that can be a tough job. Jeff, do you still remember your first commercial hunt? How much did you charge? What did you hunt and what was that experience like?

Jeff Coats: Well, I guess I thought it was a lot of money back in the day, but as current things today, so I have to rewind it, this is my 25^th season, so that was 25 years ago.

Ramsey Russell: 25 years, wow.

Jeff Coats: 25 years ago. Yeah, we were in a C class, 17 foot TDB and man, I did the best that I could, I can say that first again through Donald’s tutelage he said, man and we had hunted there before, we said, this is the ramp you use, this is, I did change some stuff up of how he did decoys. But the beginning, man, we just, the long line decoys were in a basically, the amount of decoys that would fit in a 50 pound like feed sack only had one weight on them, you have to be careful when the tide changed because they kind of sometimes when they swung, they’d swing into each other. But I could just remember just being, can I remember the very first hunt? No, my very first guided hunt, I truly can’t. I remember the first season crystal clear and I can just remember being successful and the funny thing was, like, I didn’t give as much credit to sea ducks as what I gave to diving ducks and I even charged less to go sea duck hunting because I didn’t think there was going to be anybody that wanted to go, I charged $125 a person to go sea duck hunting and for canvasbacks, I was charging $150 a person and Donald straight up told me, he’s like, man, you got this wrong. He said, not that everybody can go shoot canvasbacks, but that stuff is truly available to many more people than what you think, he said the niche market for you is going to be sea ducks because everybody can’t go sea duck hunting on their own and –

Ramsey Russell: He was right, he was exactly right.

Jeff Coats: And it took me a little bit to figure that out, but I was like, hell yeah, right. I’m like again, I was charging less for sea ducks because I didn’t think anybody wanted to go.

Ramsey Russell: Real quick, Jeff, what was Donald’s background? What, I mean, like, what did he do before retirement age? What was it? Was it technology? Was he an executive? I mean, what did he do?

Jeff Coats: He was Eastern Shore waterman.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff Coats: That basically went in the Coast Guard and he can again, I remember the story he told me, I can’t remember who it was, but basically, they drew, he and his buddy that were in the office or the supply room, somebody came in and said, hey man, one of you guys got to go to Vietnam, like, I don’t know, just, you want to draw straws, how are we going to do this? And they drew straws, the other fellow went to Vietnam and Donald said, didn’t last 2 days and he’s like, that could have been him, but he was in the Coast Guard, he said he really hung out a lot in Alaska and he quickly learned though in Alaska having 3 daughters, that was not the place he would go.

Ramsey Russell: So, he was a tough guy too.

The Journey of a Waterman: From Insurance to Seafood.

And he tried selling insurance for a little while and it just wasn’t for him and he went back to being a waterman and he found out that it was better, he started Taylor Island Seafood way back in the day and he found out that you could work.

Jeff Coats: And he tried selling insurance for a little while and it just wasn’t for him and he went back to being a waterman and he found out that it was better, he started Taylor Island Seafood way back in the day and he found out that you could work, not that it wasn’t work, but it was better to be kind of that the middleman, if you want to say. So he would buy the crabs, buy oyster from the guys that were actually doing it and then he would be selling them and he was, his big deal was soft shell crab, soft shell crab and snapping turtles, he would load his truck up with soft shell crabs in the season and or in the summertime, snapping turtles. He’d get on the ferry in Lewis, Delaware, go across to Cape May, New Jersey, drive up to Atlantic City and they would buy as much as he could bring up to him and he was doing really well, he talked about possibly getting like a little seaplane, very small scale, he lived on the water on the Marshall Creek that he could fly his plane back and forth to where his tail is on seafood was on the water and he had his first heart attack, and basically it was just his health declined and if you don’t know when you do soft shell crabs, when you shed them, it is a 24 hour, a day job, there’s got to be somebody watching those crabs 24 hours a day. If one sheds and the other hard crabs, it still can have a chance to they still got some hardness to their shell, excuse me, they’ll bust that crab open, crabs are very high in iodine and basically that they’ll kill the other crabs. So it was a very labor intensive and again he had his family, his daughters and his wife, so they did take turns, shift work if you will, but basically it was kind of his health was his decline is his heart.

Ramsey Russell: I just wonder what he did because when I think back to those old Internet days which took windows to get most of us online and we could just kind of start clicking around, but really and truly a lot of those old forms were predominantly older people initially and I guess because they had the money for a computer and the time to figure it out, it took older guys to show me the ropes when Internet just started, it wasn’t a kid, you didn’t go ask a 10 or 12 year old kid or 15 year old kid how to do that technology, they didn’t know.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, not like today. Yeah, no, I wouldn’t tell you, I truly can’t answer you, I don’t know how, like how was he into technology or at least the Internet and computer, I can’t tell you that. But he did tell me, he says, you need to learn this, so here’s a quick little story, it might not be quick, but here’s a little story, so I love photography and back in the day I would shoot the film and fast film with developing was 2 days, that was fast, then you got these pictures, what are you going to do with them? Well now you got to say here, I got a scanner, you have to show me how to how you scan a picture, so now it’s a file. What do you do with the file? How am I going to put this on the refuge or put them on any forums? Yeah, well, you got to upload it to a server and you’re going to give a title and then you had to know HTML code and that’s how, in the beginning before the pages got a little more sophisticated and there’s a little photo icon, you touch that and it basically uploads the photo for you, in the beginning, it was like it was a pretty drawn out process.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: And I always kind of like to say, man, somebody could type and say, hey, we shot 200 snow geese today and type and say they did it, well, we only shot 20, but here’s the picture of it and I would post a picture. So he taught me that and he said that this is how you’re going to promote yourself and this is how you’re going to grow, he said at the same time you’re also putting yourself on other people’s radar that you’re going to, other people are going to want to do what you do. So he says like that double edged sword of the fine line of you’re going to want, you’re going to need to promote yourself, but the more you promote yourself, the more other people are, chances are that they’re going to want to do what you’re doing. So he taught me the Internet before I truly, not that I know what it was, but by that time, he’s like, hey man, like you got to, this is what you got to jump on and this is what you got to learn and again, like he was truly in my mind, he was way ahead of his time or at least the time of technology for that everybody else the public was using.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I tell you what, he was dead on about those sea ducks. We were on a – Terry Denmon and I met with some folks the other day and they asked us each what’s one hunt you would tell somebody they got to go on? And Denmon mentioned coming to Canada, which I can’t disagree, if you’ve never dry field hunted for ducks and geese and snows and blues and specks and it’s an amazing experience, it’s early in the year, your season probably hadn’t started yet. But my response was sea duck hunting, if you’ve never done it, I think you need to do it, I thought because it’s unlike any duck hunt that most of us between the coastlines can relate to, it’s different species, it’s just different and it’s going to be amazing. And I really think that outside of your own comfort zone, well, I tell you what, sea ducks ought to be on everybody’s radar and so many people today, Jeff, are now back in those days we’re talking about, it was cool, man, there’s Jeff posting up pictures of the Scoter trio and there’s somebody else posting up pictures of Barrow’s golden eyes or something else that you didn’t really find in Mississippi and we were all kind of chasing something, but nobody was really formally chasing a number, we weren’t chasing a collection, but now people are, now it’s kind of been formalized into a collection. And I still remain an experienced collector and will say forevermore, that just is an icebreaker for a totally different experience than what 90% of the American population is used to sea ducks. Sea ducks, man, go out and chase sea ducks, it’s a humbling experience. Now, I’m going to tell you that right now, I’m constantly humbled by scoters, they are trucking through the decoys.

Jeff Coats: 100%. And the other factor there, too, is big boat, small boat, the water can be flat, the boat’s rocking and rolling, it’s moving. So there’s that factor there, too.

Ramsey Russell: Whether a layout boat hunter, a big boat, most times I’ve successfully shot sea ducks, it’s not just the left and right swing on a duck, it’s also like kind of like playing a version of break the egg on a trampoline, there’s a little up and down stuff going too, so it can be dawning. And Jeff, who taught you the ropes? Did Donald or others teach you the ropes? Going from, I mean, there’s a lot involved, like you, for example, you were talking about your long line rigs, having a couple of rigs with one anchor, I mean and them getting tangled up, that’s a real different experience to a puddle duck hunter is going out, setting those lines and hiding in plain sight, but setting those lines that they come in right, working with the tide so they don’t get tangled up, it’s an art form unto itself.

Jeff Coats: Well, I’ve always wanted to look professional, so I want to go out there and have my quote, shit together. I don’t want to look like it’s the first time, even if it’s just unloading the boat at the ramp and putting the boat back on. These days I’ve done it many times, but back then, yeah, I mean we fun hunted a lot and I did get my chance to run and basically with Donald, we would shoot the way the seasons were, again, we’d go shoot wood ducks maybe in that October split and we’d still get down, I’m running my own boat, we’d still get down to the ramp at 10:00 in the morning or so and get out there and the scoter is still flying and so I did get a good opportunity to do that and then kind of getting myself into it slowly, we do these refuge hunts where you guys from specifically more Pennsylvania would come down and kind of camp out at the hotel if you will and cook out and that kind of stuff And it was all based around public hunting and so I did feel like I had a good bit of experience going into it before I started guiding. But I still think that I’ve learned over the years with doing traveling with the DVDs, series back in the day, the TV show and the other TV shows with hunting with other guides, I definitely can say I took away very positive things that they did and then I took away some stuff like, holy moly, I can’t believe he just did that. Like, that was, I’ll mark that one down to make sure I never do that kind of thing, but just kind of evolving and again like it’s a service, right? So, I don’t shoot my gun when I go with you. If you’re in the boat, it’s about you, not me, I’m shooting in the beginning, still camera and today I try to shoot as much video as I can, so it’s about you, not me. I’m not, I’ve heard the horror stories sitting there in the morning where they’re hunting somewhere and the young fellow stands up and shoots and then he says, take them after he unloaded his gun kind of thing and he was their guy.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I’ve seen and heard it all, Jeff. I mean there are still duck guides that the guide gets the band.

Jeff Coats: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Can you believe that? And when you meet a duck guy that’s just got ropes and ropes of duck bands, you better believe he didn’t shoot them all, there ain’t no way. Jeff, circle back to photography just a little bit because Donald was right. I mean, I don’t guess, I remember the print film days, I’ve resisted every technological step along the way, I can remember being 20 years old, 21 years old, some kids from out west talking about they were all into these computer things and I just, oh, it’s a fad, that ain’t real, it’s a fad. And then the Internet came along, by then I had, I felt like I was a pretty decent photographer and I shot, man, I shot Kodachrome and some print film, but a lot of slide film and I resisted and resisted the digital revolution until I realized this ain’t going away and this is pretty damn easy, it’s kind of, it’s almost foolproof compared to the film because you can learn quicker, you can look at your screen, put it up on the computer and see what you did wrong. And it really upped the learning curve, but then those are some of the earliest memories I have of Pitboss was when you started posting the digital photography. Did you resist that technology? What did it for you getting into the digital platform with cameras?

Jeff Coats: Did I resist? Hell no, it was easy.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: Easy and simple, hunting with Donald, there was a fellow, another friend of a friend kind of thing was there and it was Olympus 465, I think it was just a point and shoot and I couldn’t believe that, well, wait a second, I can take 300 pictures on that little card, oh and like you just said and I can look at as soon as I get to a computer or on the back of the screen, but I can download them, I can like get them up instantly. Oh, yeah, let’s do this. So, play around with a bunch of different little point and shoots and then there’s many people in this, in my story, I guess if you want to call it a story that I have to give credit to and I have to give Scott Moody the credit for getting me into DSLRs. We were good friends and Scott knew I was taking pictures with a point and shoot, he’s like, man, he says, you’re out there every day. He said, wouldn’t you want to take a picture that would be quality for quality of a magazine cover? I was like, yeah, but I was like, I have no idea how to use one of those things. It was the Canon 20D and he had one, he says, you buy the Canon 20D, buy a lens, he says, I’ll tell you everything you need to know. So jokingly, over the years, I always tell people when I get a new Canon camera, I throw the manual away because Scott Moody is my man, hey, Scott, how you do this? And he’s always more than helpful, but that’s kind of how I made the transition and yeah, just try to take the best picture I can when I’m out there.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the thing about it is how many in the last 25 years you seem to guide every single day and you seemed to have guided a whole lot 25 years ago even and you’re out there all the time, you’re not shooting, you’ve got this camera DSLR and boy, I mean, lots and lots of opportunities, lots of setups, lots of practice, one of the most indelible photos, absolute Pitboss photo I’ve ever seen, it was a scoter just surrounded by PBs and it was amazing asnd you know what photo I’m talking about.

Jeff Coats: Yeah. I think I got to say, I was probably just lucky maybe, huh?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, it was fast enough, it was bright enough light, it was open enough f stop, it was fast enough speed that it just caught everything perfectly.

Jeff Coats: Thank you. I do have other shots that you can see that you can – shots, I do have other images that you can see the shot around the bird, but that it was a drake surf scoter.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Jeff Coats: He was lit up, he was in focus, the shot that’s, I mean, it’s just like a freaking, I don’t know, how close, it was very close to him because it’s in focus too and yeah, it was in field stream, I think they said something that this is more incredible than a – something about reference it to a shot of Bigfoot, like this is –

Ramsey Russell: Here’s the first time I’d ever seen anything like that, for sure.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, that was probably, I know I was still in the TDB, so that was probably like maybe like the year 2000, 2001, somewhere in there. Maybe, it was definitely between before 2004. But yeah, I can remember the guys in the boat and I don’t really remember the exact shot, but I can remember the day that that took place.

Ramsey Russell: And everything changes just like, again, I resisted iPhone, man. I was a CrackBerry addict, I could type on that keypad so quick, quicker than I can on a computer and loved it, but it was terrible for pictures. And when CrackBerry went away, I got the iPhone, never ever looked back and it’s crazy because, man, I used to just travel the world with this big backpack, not huge backpack, but a big camera backpack with lenses and cameras and extra camera body because more than once one took a drink and then I had all kinds of stuff that I needed on a plane or needed in the truck, just stowed away and everything from granola bars to God knows what and it’s been years now. And it’s not so much that, well, I like good pictures, I like being around these guys today, there’s still a lot of great professional photographers out there with the big lenses, I can think of a bunch of them and I like their photography a lot, but it’s almost like in the same way that Donald was talking about you marketing yourself in this new digital age now it has transitioned into social media such that iPhone footage, cell phone footage has almost become a language unto itself in the way that a picture is worth a thousand words only we talk faster now and it’s like for example, on Instagram, I mean, it’s not even a horizontal format anymore, it’s geared towards a vertical phone format, which changes everything and I noticed I keep up with you still, do you still take your big long lens out or are you all iPhone now?

Jeff Coats: No, I mean, I had some – as far as video goes now I don’t really, I don’t take the still camera, although this year I did get a new body. This guy’s been on me for a couple years now to get a body and I did get a newer body in the spring and I am going to kind of revamp and try to take some more still shots and see if I can capture that the scooter shot that you were talking about again. But I just kind of – And I just find that somewhat is that – and I don’t want this is probably going to sound like I’m being negative, but like everybody has a still camera, right? Because you just mentioned iPhone, everybody takes pictures, not everybody does video. There’s a lot of people doing video, but video takes another little bit of effort, not a little bit of technology, not a little bit of smarts to make it that. So I just kind of gravitated towards video and again, I mentioned the DVD in the TV show when I had the splits there, somebody was doing video for me, now all of a sudden, wait a second, I have no idea how to do video. So, it would have been like in 2000, I can remember going to bring up PEI Canada, I can remember going to PEI in December of 2011 and that had my first MacBook and I’m sitting there in Jeff’s kitchen like editing footage on the old iMovie and so that in that 2010 to 2011 trans period, I kind of transitioned more from still pictures to doing video.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jeff Coats: Not that still pictures don’t tell the story, but video definitely tells the story. Excuse me, some of the – It’s just social media and the way people are and hunters and anti-hunters, but man some of those reels I put up during the season, like they’re, people are just brutal about hunters, be brutal to a hunter saying you can’t shoot and you suck and all these different kind of things about that, they’re behind missing them and then other people just basically straight up anti hunting comments, but again –

Ramsey Russell: Well, if you’re going to put yourself out there this day and age and we all do, you got to have thicker skin than normal.

Jeff Coats: 100%. But I’m the one putting them out there now the thing is though, that I use, you don’t really ever see who it is, right? They know that they were in the boat today and I put the videos up this afternoon about a night I meet up with them and they’re like, holy moly, man, people are just, they’re just raping us on Instagram, on comments, that’s a lot –

Ramsey Russell: Epic misses and epic hits, that’s my 2 favorite things to watch myself and I can do both of them, buddy. I can mess with the absolute best of them and anybody that talks about shooting those scoters, that laughs or dismisses somebody from missing apparently has never shot scoters.

Jeff Coats: If you go to my Instagram and go to the reels, I’ve got 3 pinned and one of them is, it was early season last year, it’s got a million and a half views where this bird comes in and they go boom and he’s like 2 feet behind each time and the bird just flies away and people are just, they’re just brutal these guys, but again, like the other thing too is again, unless you were in the boat, you don’t know who they are because I don’t really show them, I’m on the bird, you can see somebody’s thinking, somebody’s back of their heads or that kind of thing, so I’m not really like just I’m not really putting them out there that, hey Joe Smith is just, this is –

Ramsey Russell: It just blows my mind that watching a duck on your video slide across the decoys, they’re doing Mach 40. Even when they flap the window and drop the paddles, they’re still moving, they’re still trucking, they’re low on the water and it’s not that I’m sitting in a good foot ground, it’s not like I’m just sitting on concrete floor shooting or at a shooting range, I mean there’s all kinds of stuff, I’m going left and right, back and forth, up and down, all at the same time and the birds moving and it’s very challenging I think it is to shoot those scoters. One good thing I do like about shooting scoters is if you miss, you’re behind, but you can see how far behind you are and you can adjust pretty quick, if they come in low, you see the splashes.

Jeff Coats: That and I always tell people, man, we’re not shooting wood ducks, if you miss that one, hang tight, there’s going to be another one.

Ramsey Russell: God, it covers this –

Jeff Coats: Yeah, it’s not going to be that. One of my famous well, a question I get asked quite often hey Jeff, like what shells, what size, what shot size all these kind of things and my line is man, you can be shooting a 10 cent shell or a 10 dollar shell at them, if you’re 3 feet behind them, you’re 2 feet behind them and it doesn’t matter what you’re shooting at them because you’re not hitting them because you’re behind them. It really is, that’s the truth.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s good stuff. When did you jump up to the world’s biggest duck boat? I want to hear all about the world’s largest duck boat.

Jeff Coats: So, I’ve been in fiberglass boats forever and Steve Hoover in New Philadelphia, Ohio, I’d go out to the Clayton, excuse me, not Clayton, I’d go out to the Westlake Decoy Show 20 years ago and he’d be talking to me, we’ve known each other forever, I’ve had his number in my phone forever and he’d always tell me, he’s like, hey man, one day you’re going to be in my boat and I’m like, yeah, I don’t think so. And just the way things align, I’m cruising about 5 years ago, I’m cruising through and I see this post about the world’s largest duck boat and again, I didn’t have Steve’s boat, but we were friends. It’s like instantly he posted up, rewind, he posts up a picture of the 32 foot boat, so instantly I text him and he calls me, he didn’t take any –

Ramsey Russell: 32 foot.

Jeff Coats: He’s like, yeah, Jeff, it’s really nice and I said, tell me more about it, so he’s telling me about it, he’s sending me information, the fellow actually designs it, Hal Whitacre is in Annapolis, Maryland. So he’s like, hey man, he’s real close to you, sending me all these CAD drawings that the computer, when they cut it out and his boats have changed over the years and it just turned into like, hey man, I think I might need one of these and he’s like, well, Rod Merritt has, well, actually, so that was during the season –

Ramsey Russell: I might need one of these.

Jeff Coats: I might need one of these. And Karen was on board with it, so I had the green light there and after the season, I met Steve at the Harrisburg Outdoor Show, we talked for a while and he’s like, hey man, just get up, I said, I don’t need to take a boat ride, but I need to physically touch this thing before I can say yes. So, flew up the main real quick, Rod, super nice guy and I told him the same thing, I don’t need to go for a boat ride, just let me jump up and I want to take you for a boat ride. So takes her a boat ride and like get back to the hotel for had to spend the night before I flew back and I was like telling Karen, I was like, yeah, man, this is what I want to do, this is our future. This is the kind of stuff where like Donald would teach me, man, like, you need to evolve, you need to stay ahead instead of ahead of the curve and this is one of the ways of doing it.

Ramsey Russell: 32 foot long. What are the other dimensions? What kind of motor you got on it? What are some of the features on the world’s largest duck boat?

Jeff Coats: I’m going to say the beam off top of my head is 10 foot, 6 inches. The mobile boat is 25ft, that’s the entire, so the entire length of the old boat was 25ft, my cockpit in the 32 is longer than 25ft. Yeah, it’s got a 350 Suzuki on it with a duo prop, it’s got counter rotating a prop on it on one shaft. It’s my future, man, it’s the boat I’m going to have till I’m not going to guide sea ducks.

Ramsey Russell: How many people can comfortably hunt out on that boat?

Jeff Coats: Well, so I have a master captain’s license, but because the boat is not inspected by the coast Guard, I can only take 6.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff Coats: But I mean, I ease, I have super big chairs, the chairs I have in the boat are 24, 26 inches wide.

Ramsey Russell: Lazy boy recliner, probably.

Jeff Coats: 6 of those is plenty, there’s plenty of room in the boat, I still break out the stove, I cook, again I think I said this in the beginning, man, it’s a service. I just want people to have the most enjoyable time they can when they’re with me.

Ramsey Russell: What do you cook in the boat, Jeff?

Jeff Coats: So in the beginning and this is back a couple, well, at least 2 duck boats ago, I really was in that whole mode of, man, it’s got to be breakfast and inevitably, I’d be cooking breakfast and we’d have a bird down and we’d have to go chase it. And I’d be motoring around and I’d be burning stuff because I’m trying to trying to tell them where the bird is, I’m operating the boat and I’m trying to cook.

Ramsey Russell: Flip the pancake.

Maryland Crab Soup and Beyond: Crafting Memorable Meals.

A Maryland crab soup would be basically a really good vegetable soup that has crab meat in it. I could do this, this will be easy, I can make it, I can freeze it and all I’m really doing, I’m not cooking it, I’m just reheating it when I get out in the boat.

Jeff Coats: Yeah. So I lost interest in doing that really quick, like, this is just not good. Well, quite often when people come here, wherever they come from, seafood is, they don’t have fresh seafood, they don’t have seafood on and on. So, all of a sudden, I’m like, hey man, like some kind of a chowder, either like a cream of crab, cream of clam, a Maryland crab soup would be basically a really good vegetable soup that has crab meat in it. I could do this, this will be easy, I can make it, I can freeze it and all I’m really doing, I’m not cooking it, I’m just reheating it when I get out in the boat. So I get out in the boat, I can let that thing simmer for 2 hours and not have any issues, I mean, we could literally chase birds forever and I’m not going to burn anything. So it just turned into that and all of a sudden, like I’ve figured it out, like, wow, it’s a hit, man, people really react to this. This is a good thing and current day, some fellows who turned out to be really good friends of ours in Alabama Duck Blind Bistro where we’re, I’m doing fresh biscuits now with the soup, so it’s just try to, again try to evolve, try to make things better, I have had people aboard, I won’t, well, I won’t name his name, but anyway, one morning, he’s a writer for one of the large duck organizations, the Duck Hunters Organization and was made known to me. He’s like, hey man, he can’t eat shellfish, I said, well, does he like beef? And they’re like, yep. I said, well, how about bacon cheeseburgers, will he like that? Can you can do that? I was like, yeah, I’ll do bacon cheeseburgers for him. That was the same kind of thing with the reaction like this might be the best cheese, bacon cheeseburger I’ve ever had and I’m having in a duck blind and he shot his brant that morning, so something he hadn’t done. So they’re just trying to make it not over the top, but try to make it over the top.

Ramsey Russell: You mentioned brant, what species are you hunting when guys book trips with you now? Jeff, what are you, I know you the target, you’re the sea duck guy, Chesapeake Bay sea duck guy man, I mean that is scoters, your logo which is badass is a surf scoter’s I recall. But what is the – are you also hunting brant?

Jeff Coats: So, first off, we got to say Scott Moody in because that was his idea when he made my first webpage, we need a logo to base everything upon and that was his, that I gave my ideas and that’s what he came up with, so got to give Scott another thumbs up on that and a salute to him because he came up with that. But yeah, basically, if you got to remember too like I said when I first went it was a 30 day duck season and 107 day sea duck season, so the special sea duck season in the Atlantic Flyway was 107 days. 7 bird limit and then in the 7 birds eventually it was a 4 scoter limit in there and then they reduced the special sea duck season to only 60 days and the reduction from 7 birds went to 5 birds, 5 sea ducks total and then they also came up with that reduction they made a 4 bird oldsquaw limit and a 4 eider limit in that 5 and still 4 scoter and then current, that was for 6 years that there was a 60 day special sea duck season and then current day in the Atlantic Flyway whatever state you’re in when ducks are open, that’s when you can shoot sea ducks and in the 6 duck limit you can’t have more than 4 sea ducks and there can’t be more than 3 or 1 species. So it has definitely kind of the limits, things have changed over the years for sure, brant, I’ll answer that for you. I was very fortunate to see many years that the brant limit in the Atlantic Flyway was 3 birds and when it was a 3 bird limit, it was like scoter these things were everywhere, current day it’s a 30 day one bird limit and there’s just not as many brants, there’s that many brand around. I think the cutoff number for a season is about a hundred thousand birds and I heard last year it was they were at like a hundreds and thousands of birds, brant’s the only bird that they, in the Atlantic Flyway that I know of that they base next year’s season on this year’s winter count, they don’t do anything up where they nest, all they do is just basically it’s a numbers thing. So when they do the January count, whatever that index that they come up with and say the brant population is X whatever it is, it could be a 30 day season, 45 or 60 day season. So, I had many seasons, that was 60 days for brant it was 3 birds.

Ramsey Russell: I just had this question and not so much about what you do but do they still have a mute swan season in Maryland or was I dreaming?

Jeff Coats: Nah, the Delaware, you can still shoot them, Maryland, who would it be? Audubon Society got into it with the Humane Society, there was a big lawsuit. So basically, the state just went around, state employees, people in the summertime and they molted and grabbed them and killed them. It was upwards –

Ramsey Russell: So that’s conservation.

Jeff Coats: Yeah 100%, the population was upwards to 4,000 birds on the Maryland, Chesapeake Bay and they will tell you now, they’ve controlled it to a down around its 200 birds maybe. Those things eat an average of 26 pounds of vegetation a day and if you give any credit that vegetation is the health of the Bay, they’re eating a lot of Bay grasses, so that was another reason why they needed to be out of here.

Ramsey Russell: Extremely territorial, they’ll run other waterfowl off too.

Jeff Coats: 100% and they’re not native here, right.

Ramsey Russell: Yep, totally. That’s what I don’t understand why anti would care about shooting an invasive species.

Jeff Coats: When you go to Delaware in the morning, Delaware is a lot of public hunts that you have to go for a draw each morning, there’s a sign there reminding you please shoot mute swans, so it’s just the difference of you cross the state line, Maryland’s illegal and in Delaware they’re telling you please remember to shoot a mute swan if you see one.

Ramsey Russell: Jeff, for as long as I’ve known you, especially for a sea duck captain, you’ve uncharacteristically had retrievers and that’s not something you see a lot of in big water hunts or people running retrievers, black labs, you’ve always had, black lab females as I recall.

Jeff Coats: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: When did you get your first dog? Did you get it by the time you started carving years ago or?

Jeff Coats: No, well, I had a Chocolate way back in the day, at the beginning, it was basically just a really nice pet and the more I started guiding I was like, hey man, like that just fits with what I do you need something to retrieve the birds. So in 2001, I really had no idea what FC, AFC, MH, all these different names or titles, abbreviations around dogs, pedigrees and things, I had no idea what it meant. But everybody just said, hey man, like this is a really nice breeding, he’s become a good friend too, Roy Scahill out in Mount Airy, Pennsylvania, kind of west of, northwest of DC, a really nice female got Coot and again, I had no idea what I had. I never force fetched her, I didn’t do anything with her except I took her out in the boat and they shot the scoter, she saw him, she swam out and brought him back, wasn’t like she was going anywhere, she always came back to the boat and I was doing this at 6, between 6 and 7 months old, she was retrieving scoters in the back. And I can vividly remember this, some guys came from New Jersey and I was just a little bashful, saying, hey man, like you got to give her a little leeway, at this time, she was 8 months old. I said, she’s 8 months old, I said, she’s only retrieved 80 scoters, so please, she’s really, she’s new to this and they’re like, whoa, stop. Our dog at home is 8 years old, it has not retrieved 80 birds in his life, like she’s doing a great job, she should run the gunnels and just, she wanted to retrieve man and she was always with me and yeah, she was an awesome dog. I did not force fetch her until she was 13 months old, sorry about that, you still got me.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: All right, a call just popped up, that’s all right.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: I did not force fetch her until she was 13 months old and I know that honoring is part of being a master hunter, she would have been a master hunter before she was 24 months, it took me 26 months because she just didn’t really like to honor but –

Ramsey Russell: What she wants to get them.

Jeff Coats: And I got her qualified all age at 4 years old. So anyway, just we trained every day and that’s why I had to top her on the pickup truck and I managed to accumulate a couple more black labs through that time period, another nice one had was a dog named Diamond. Diamond and Scoter, excuse me, Diamond and Coot were cousins and she was an awesome dog too, loved to retrieve. She was a bigger dog, a long legged dog, really looked to be an American dog, but yeah man, Coot back in the day just, she always with me from going to – she traveled one year we did the trip from in Maryland to like Watertown, New York, Ontario, she retrieved canvasbacks on the Delta.

Ramsey Russell: Delta Marsh.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say, thank you.

Ramsey Russell: It is there in Manitoba, yeah. Wow.

Jeff Coats: I’m about to say Manitoba. Yes, Delta Marsh and then we went on over to Saskatchewan, Prince Albert and that was a big trip we did one year. But she went to PEI and retrieved barrow’s goldeneye she went, she was a dog, man, she loved to do it and she was a dog, so when I say dog, that’s a positive word for people that don’t know, she was an animal, man. She was a dog.

Ramsey Russell: What do you look for in a lab to hunt those kind of sea ducks with? I get the puddle ducks, but man, I mean to run off that big water to get those scoters and all that, a lot of current, a lot of wind, a lot of waves, I mean is there like something qualities you’re looking for when you go pick a public, I know you got a new dog now.

Jeff Coats: We do and we just bred some, we just had a little pups too. But I mean I just look for, I didn’t know what FC, AFC meant back in the day, but I do now and I wanted a dog that just has drive and energy and that’s more your American dogs, they may not make the best house pet at times for certain people in certain situations, but man, that’s what I want. Karen, back in the day, so eventually I had 5 black labs, I’d go into the vet at one time and they’d say, hey, Mr. Coates is coming in and he’d bring all 5 black labs in, she knew him. Sadly, she put them all down, but she never got to see him run and when we put Booger was the only male I kept, we bred Coot twice, we kept Booger was from the 1^st litter and Bristol was from the 2^nd litter and there was a poacher and Diamond, Coot and Karen again, sadly put them all down, when Booger was the last one to go down, she says, you want to get another dog? And like, nope, I’m done, we were fishing at the time our boat was not fast going offshore and that was in June, I was like, no, I’m good. Well, she did look, she looked on the FA for me to see if she could find anything out of Coot, everything was older and just by chance, I got a phone call from somebody that knew me from the refuge and he even said straight up, like, this is going to be weird, man, because you don’t, we’ve never met and you don’t know me, but if you can get up in 2 days, if you can get on a plane and come up to El Campo, he says, let’s come and shoot some Texas teal, so I did, went down there, gunned over dogs, there’s dogs at the camp and as soon as I got back to the airport, I called Karen, I was like, man, I want a dog, so that was, took me June, July, June to September and so anyway, that’s a dog that we just bred. We found going to camp, going to PEI, we were filming for Migration Nation, we stopped in Maine and picked up Rye, the 7 week old pup and COVID slowed us down a little bit with her, but Karen wanted to run, where I’m trying to go with this, Karen never got to see the dogs run, but she wanted to run a hunt test. So I said, okay, a junior hunter and basically to me, junior hunter is can the dog deliver the hand? Obviously, yes, they have to mark and pick the birds up, but you can sit there and hold the dog and again, can you get the bird out of the dog’s mouth before it drops it or if it does drop it, say fetch and have it pick it up. So, anyway, we ran the 4 – it delayed a little bit with Covid but we ran the 4 tests, she got her Junior Hunter and Karen’s like, this is fun, man, like what else can we run? I was like, nothing, because I didn’t do back to the pile with her, we just, the plan was to do Junior Hunter. So make a long story short, somewhere in between here, Diamond’s father, so again, Coot and Diamond were – their fathers were from the same litter, it was a lean Ma, Patty McBun breeding way back in the day. Coot was out of Dr. Feelgood, Diamond was out of Gates High Tech CEO and I get my retriever results email and here’s a – it was frozen semen, because Gates has been going a long time. But here’s a puppy in South Carolina, there’s a female that Gates sired this thing, it’s like, I am texting this woman and called her and the female was gone, so I told Karen about that, she knew that, she understood what it meant to me. So I don’t know, a couple weeks later, she sends me this Facebook post that it’s the fellow that we got Rye from, well, here’s this dog and another breeding and I looked through it, I think, damn, like, Karen knew enough to look at the pedigree and here’s Gates is in this pedigree and there’s Alex Abraham’s in this, new Kroppers in this pedigree, there’s a bunch of people that I knew, I was like, damn, Karen, you’re on the ball and when she got home, she’s like, no, it’s just Mike’s – I just saw it on Facebook, I didn’t look at any of that stuff. I said, well I want one of these puppies, she’s like, let’s do it. So I called Mike up, we already got Rye from him, he said there was one female available. So I said, mike, you got to tell me, like, Mike’s in Maine. Well, I thought he was in Maine, but he happened to be in Georgia for the winter, so he says, nobody knows there’s one spot, but nobody’s got any dogs yet. I was like, all right, back to your point, I want an energy dog, he’s like, I got you covered, so to rewind about energy, Karen’s always being in the vet world, she’s always gotten rescues and she thought when we bought Rye for $1700, that was the craziest thing, she’s like you got many dogs out there, just need a good home, I said, yeah, Karen, but like we’re buying the pedigree, we’re buying an American dog. Well and today she understands, she says, yep, I totally after seeing the dog and she’s got a motor on her that she doesn’t quit, she says, I understand what you’re saying. I like, rewind, I like dogs with energy and that’s what we bred ride with a local dog, it was FC, AFC amateur trained and the puppies are, they’re crazy as can be, in a good way, they’re crazy as can be.

Ramsey Russell: I want the same thing and I’m not dissing British or Irish or whatever other, I like American lines myself. I think they’ve just got a lot more horsepower and that’s just me, I just like the American, I like the build, I like the confirmation, I like the speed. It’s like you were talking about wanting to drag race earlier, that’s what I want in a dog, I want a drag racer that when you turn the motor off and it’s time to get quiet, just sitting in the garage looking good, I want that off switch too and I’ve been blessed to have that. But if you can train a dog or not to do a lot of things, you can’t instill drive. My number one, I hate a dog that walks to get a duck and I’m not dissing anybody dog, I’m just saying, me personally, I don’t want a dog that walks out to get a duck, I want one and I don’t want one that looks like it’s running half throttle, I want one that’s given everything it’s got every single time and you got to have it.

Jeff Coats: The AKC stuff that I judge, we call that style, we want a dog that has style.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I want style, I did. And the truth matter is you talking about not getting another dog, man, I shudder to think if day comes that I don’t want another dog, I’m not hunting, it’s gotten to that point, to me, it’s about the whole thing, Jeff, it’s about the whole experience and a good retriever, mine, yours, his is such a big part of it, but in the same way that there’s just something visceral, something intimate about a duck coming into something you carved with your own hands, the same can be said about your dog, I just love it. My trainer told me the other day he saw that Char dog on the Internet and he said, you’re just a trigger puller, she’s the rock star and I go, I’m her biggest fan and that’s the truth, I’m her biggest fan. I’m all my dog’s biggest fan.

Jeff Coats: So let me tell you why I said I don’t want a dog because after Coot and Diamond were gone, I still did like Booger again from the 1^st litter of Coot, I did take him, it was in the middle of December, we were in the ocean of Ocean City, 2013 and the boat, the duck boat at the time was 25ft and the tiger shark was half the length of the boat and that was my last time I took a dog to sea duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: I heard that. Wow.

Jeff Coats: Yeah so –

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I didn’t know you all had that kind of stuff out there where you hunt.

Balancing the Risks of Water Retrieves with Dogs.

I was like, nope, it’s wintertime and that shark, the thing that I vividly remember about it was that it had to be have the girth of a 55 gallon drum, it was freaking huge.

Jeff Coats: Well, I mean, I didn’t, over the years, it actually made me feel a tad bit irresponsible because again, like with Coot and Diamond, the bird was dead or the birds were dead, I let them swim forever out there and I’d have people all the time saying, aren’t you worried about a shark? I was like, nope, it’s wintertime and that shark, the thing that I vividly remember about it was that it had to be have the girth of a 55 gallon drum, it was freaking huge. And so much so we’re like, forget about the dog or like, are we okay? Like, it was big, man, it was just cruising along, it looked like it was a – from a distance, it looked like it was like a row boat that was like capsized and just under the surface of the water, it was big. I’ve never taken the time to read it because I don’t want to read it, but last year in those Nova Scotia, a great white killed a black lab.

Ramsey Russell: I think I heard about that, it was all over the Internet.

Jeff Coats: Send that to me, I never bothered to read it because I just didn’t want to read it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: So once we got around that and again, like Texas teals, what put it back in me, I was like, yeah, we need dogs, so much so we have 5 black labs now.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, good for you, I know the feeling. Jeff, no half measures for you, man, you’re all in on everything you’ve ever done and I mean, from decoy carving to guiding to photography, world’s largest duck boats, retrievers. What do you actually do for fun?

Jeff Coats: I think this is fun.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. I’d say the same thing, I mean, I just wondered if you had anything outside the duck hunting world that you and Karen did.

Jeff Coats: Well, I mean, this weekend I’m going to, the Scoter dog is the 2^nd pup, the breeding that Karen sent me that we got from Mike Baraby was, that’s the Scoter dog. The Rye dog, that theme is whiskeys and bourbon, so she’s Rye, she has her daughter named Mash, she has a son named Elmer T, for Elmer T. Lee, straight bourbon, whiskey and then Proof is for 100 – I like Weller Antique 107, Proof and so his name is Proof, so that’s that side of it and then with Scoter, Karen envisions and Karen named her for me because we just weren’t sure what and she’s like call her Scoter, like, that’s the license plate that’s on my trailer for the duck boat, it says Scoter, she said call her Scoter. So anyway, if the plan is to breed her somewhere along the way and we’re going to, I like females, although we do have 2 males, but we’ve already named that dog, if she has a female or if we keep one, that dog would be named Surf.

Ramsey Russell: Would be named what?

Jeff Coats: Surf, like surf, go to surf.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, yeah. Wow.

Jeff Coats: But yeah, so we got, where I’m going with this is Scoter’s entered, she’s young, just 19 months old, the first master test was a little bit of a ball buster and she did not do well and then she’s one for two in master, so we got her entered in a master and a senior this weekend. So hunt test would be, I guess you could say we do that for fun. I mentioned PEI a couple times to you, we go to PEI now every season and that’s just a good, do we hunt? Yes, we do, but we’re just about it’s a getaway for us, it’s a vacation for us, we’ve got great friends on that island. The island itself is beautiful, it’s a fun trip for us and that would be a vacation for us, if you will.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I appreciate the hookup by the way, I really do. I’m heading that way, I’ve got a very ambitious road trip this year and the only thing I’m dreading is getting from Calgary to Ontario, that’s about a 35 hour drive, that’s going to be a lick, but hey once I’m there, I’m not too far away from PEI.

Jeff Coats: You’re going to drive across the largest bridge in the world that over ice covered water, the Northumberland Bridge, the Confederation Bridge over the Northumberland straight, it’s like 17 and a half kilometers across.

Ramsey Russell: Golly, I did not know that.

Jeff Coats: I’ve never seen it iced up, but it’s a big bridge.

Ramsey Russell: I just assumed it was a ferry that took you out there.

Jeff Coats: There is to the south, there is a ferry, just that it takes you a lot longer, it’s more of a drive to get to the ferry, plus it’s just more, they don’t charge, so when you go across the bridge, they don’t charge you to get on the island, but they charge you $54 to get off the island.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, Jeff, last question. I just sunk in, hey, do you have a favorite duck?

Jeff Coats: Favorite duck?

Ramsey Russell: I mean, do you have a favorite? But you grew up shooting puddle ducks, canvasback, you all got black ducks still up there and you make a career out of shooting sea ducks, I just wondered if you had a day off to go by yourself, what would you be targeting? Most likely.

Jeff Coats: Man, I really, even though the surf scoter is my logo, I have to say maybe that the common scoter is the black scoter, American scoter, whatever you want to call, that might actually be my favorite scoter.

Ramsey Russell: Why’s that?

Jeff Coats: Little curly, little afro feather in its head. It’s got a real nice purple iridescence, the bill, I don’t know, to me, they’re actually a bigger bodied bird than a surf scoter, they don’t look it because the surf scoters got all the head and the bill going on, but if you hold one in hand, I mean, to me the surf is smaller than a common or black scoter and then obviously your white one is the largest, this year to PEI, we’re always there a little early, we’re going to be – my daughter gets married when we normally go up, so we’re going to be up there later, a favorite duck and I’ve been very fortunate to shoot them with the auto brothers Jason and John back in the day, John and Jason.

Ramsey Russell: I already know what you’re going to say, go ahead.

Jeff Coats: And that’s when we shot 7 of them then, but on PEI you can shoot one a day.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Coats: So we’re going to try to do a nice little hunt with Jeff and Karen, she wants to shoot one too. We’ll see if Scoter can retrieve them, but probably a barrow’s goldeneye. And definitely, man, it’s not a duck, brant are very high on my list.

Ramsey Russell: I like brant too, I really, I don’t know why I like them, but I like them. It seems like people on the Atlantic Coast either love them or hate them and I love them, they decoy, when you’re on the right spot at the right time, they decoy and that’s what I love about them, they decoy so good.

Jeff Coats: Well, much like I told you, man, when the limit was 3, even it was 2 there before and after the 3 bird years, I mean, if you’re halfway close and you put decoys out and you blow on a call to them and man, those things go out of their way to decoy. So I guess that would be the attraction to them. I got to say, man, Mexico’s is on our list, I had never been there and that would be, yeah, it’d be cool to shoot other ducks, Cinnamon teal, but like, I want to go to Mexico to shoot a black brant.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s my favorite bird down there, I believe, I just love to shoot them. They’re not as consistent as they used to be in some of the places, but we’re working on going to scout this year a new location for brant and I’m excited for it. We need it and a lot of people love to shoot them. Jeff, if you had unlimited anything, what would it be?

Jeff Coats: Say again, I’m sorry.

Ramsey Russell: If you had unlimited anything, what would it be?

Jeff Coats: Ooh, I can say a lot of things.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, half your dog are named after bourbon, but you wouldn’t get much decoy carving done.

Jeff Coats: No. Yeah, sometimes I become unproductive when that happens, although I do enjoy sipping when I’m painting. Man, it’s going to sound cheap, but like money, dollar bills would probably create problems, but it would allow us to do a lot of things. I hate to say, like I’m chasing, that’s what I chase, but it kind of is like, this is, to me what I’ve done for 25 years is a big hustle and when I say hustle, I don’t mean it like –

Ramsey Russell: Time sink.

Jeff Coats: Yeah, like I’m ripping people off night, like you got hustled. But man, I think in my mind, I hustle and it’s a hustle, man. Karen quit her real job to make me more productive and time and money, like I just said, for this building, we did a barndominium, it’s 8,200 square feet and I need money. So it’s, money would cure, would pay things off, we would breathe a tad bit easier and like I said, I hate to be like, money is everything, because it’s not, but it definitely, if my checkbook was much larger, how about that? It doesn’t have to be unlimited, but if our checkbook was larger, it would definitely just make –

Ramsey Russell: That’s a great answer, I don’t really don’t need anything, I love everything I’ve got, I love my life and everything about it, I love my shotgun and I’m that guy that wears a coat till it, I don’t quit on a coat just because it tries to give up, I keep wearing it, same with a watch, same with shoes or crocs or anything else I’m wearing. But you know what I think the thing about money, what it allows you to quote, buy, unquote, it’s not the stuff, it’s the time.

Jeff Coats: Time, 100%.

Ramsey Russell: And that really, to me, in my world, that’s the greatest limiting factor and I mean by my world, I don’t mean my personal life, Jeff. I mean just a lot of the people I deal with, the clients, the customers, a lot of them don’t have an issue with money, it’s just time and I think that’s what having a bigger checkbook and not having to worry so much about it is, it would really free up a lot of time, I think it would.

Jeff Coats: Yeah. I tell people it took me it took me 44 years to find my best friend, because that’s what Karen is to me and she often says, hey, wow, if we met 20 years earlier, I tell her I was like, well, if we met 20 years earlier, this is not the Jeff that that you seeing now, like, some of that stuff had to happen for me to be, stuff happens for reasons, whatever the reasons are, but definitely life experiences make you who you are and in 2023 or 2093, like, that’s not the person I was in 20, 2013. Anyway, I’m rambling on that one, but, yeah, I’m very happy, I’m still kind of stupid smile on the face because people say, well, money doesn’t make you happy. But again, like, what I just said, I don’t know if it would make us happy, but it would be stress relief and it would make things just a tad bit easier, that’s all.

Ramsey Russell: Good answer, Jeff. Speaking of being happy, I’m happy to be on the phone with you, this has been a long time coming, we’ve talked about it off and on forever and I’m really proud to have you on the Duck Season Somewhere podcast, I kept saying as much as I traveled around and this year, I will be coming down the Atlantic Coast, but time’s so tight, I won’t be stopping between PEI and West Virginia, it’s just a straight shot and got to get there and so I just the other day when I called you, I said, what are you doing? We need to record and thankfully, we got the technology to do it, but I’m really glad to hear your story and hear everything you’re going and man, you come along, isn’t it funny how in the last 25 years since we slept in, I mean, how time, how things have evolved, how technology has evolved, how the world has changed, how we’ve changed and grown up, it’s amazing.

Jeff Coats: It truly is. Yeah, man, just again, I said it beginning, each day we get older, so kind of tie into your time comment. Man, I feel very fortunate, I truly do feel fortunate, I don’t have a retirement and like other people do, but at the same time, man, there’s no guarantee I’m going to be here next month, I want to be here next month, but there’s no guarantee, so man, shoot, we need to do it now and that’s – Karen’s mom’s in Australia, we talk to her quite a bit and she calls us kids, but she’s 88 years old and she preaches to us all the time, kids, do it today, don’t wait till you’re there – you keep saying, one day I want to do this and one day I want to do that, if you don’t do it, one day never gets here.

Ramsey Russell: You’re right.

Jeff Coats: And so that’s kind of how Karen and I live. My mother would tell you, my mother lives with us also, she’s 89 years old and she’ll tell you that I just say that to justify how I live.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I think do it today is words to live by and Jeff, I’m going to end on this note. Thank you very much, I’ve enjoyed the visit today.

Jeff Coats: No, thank you, Ramsey. I appreciate you having me on, thank you very much and if you’re ever halfway close to my zip code, you need to stop.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to stop to eat that’s what I’m going to do, Jeff. I’m more likely to stop to eat than go duck hunting with you, that’s a fact, Jeff and drink some of that brown water. But folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, do it today, that’s word to live by. See you next time.

[End of Audio]

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