EP 334. New Mallard Mojo Is Old School Made Right

 

Bigger & Better: The First Mojos

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Duck Season Somewhere, where I’m at Dallas Safari Club this weekend, what a heck of a show and joining me today is my long time buddy from Mojo Outdoors, Mr. Terry Denmon. Terry, how the heck are you, man?

Terry Denmon: I’m doing wonderful today.

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t this a great show? You come every time you’re not down at where’s the Bright Ranch, that’s where you go this time, you are at Bright Ranch, shooting –

Terry Denmon: I was there last week, but this week I was here. This is the first time I’ve been in 2 years, I think, year 4 last they didn’t have it because of the pandemic and last year, for some reason, I couldn’t get here. So this is my first time back in 3 years. It gets bigger and better every time you come.

Ramsey Russell: Bigger and better every time, Man, we’ve had a lot of people stop by the booth, but we hung your brand new, which I call you brand new Mojo Mallard in the booth. You know lot of people have put spinners up. You couldn’t find us the other day, until you looked down the aisle and saw that Mojo spinning.

Terry Denmon: Well, I had your booth number, but as I always am, I didn’t bother to check yet. I walked down there where your booth was the last time I was here and I couldn’t. So, I sent my lady that did the social media post bar and sent her a text her WhatsApp, I think, what’s Ramsey’s booth number? And she sends it back, says, no, I got it. I said I’m not asking you. I am asking what is the booth number? And before she did, I looked at her and I saw that decoy spinning up there, so I made it here.

Ramsey Russell: You reached out to me, I don’t know, a month ago, 6 weeks ago and said, hey, we got a new product coming and I’d like to send you one to try. I was trying to think this morning on the way over here, the first, I had spinning wing decoys. There were all kinds of spinning wing decoys around for a long time, but I cannot remember the first Mojo. I think the first Mojo, I had was a big mallard with metal wings. Would that have been the first one I had?

Terry Denmon: Absolutely. That was the Mojo Mallard. We started off, we didn’t have one product. It was called a Mojo Mallard.

Ramsey Russell: And I still got it. You know that I am saying? I still somewhere buried up in a pile of somewhere because I’m a hoarder when it comes to gear like that. Somewhere like that, I’ve still got that old Mojo Mallard and I’ve had all the different iterations. I’ve had, of course, Spoonzilla, the blue wing teal, the green wing. I love the doves. I’ve got just gazillions of them everywhere, I travel with them. I tell people, I never leave home without a Mojo because even though outfitter over in Azerbaijan or somewhere may have a Mojo, it may not work or it may be shot up. That’s usually the cage. We had our buddy down in Argentina, all his have been proliferated. It looked like Swiss cheese sitting out there, some of these decoying ducks have come on. So I always bring my own. And I really didn’t know what to expect when he said, I really didn’t know what to expect. I’ll back up a minute. How long ago was it you all made the ultrarealistic wings? That would have been over a decade ago. That you all changed the wings and came out with the new wing types with the – because I can remember Chuck Smart calling and saying, could you take some pictures of taxidermy, you remember that?

Terry Denmon: Yeah, I do, absolutely. We were trying to get the colors right and we made the dark side feather detail was not the right thing to do.

Ramsey Russell: Why?

Terry Denmon: I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do at that time. And the only reason I let them go, the why is because you cut the flash tail.

Ramsey Russell: The contrast.

Terry Denmon: You know for a spinning wing to work, whether it has a decoy body or not. If it’s just a blade, which you know, originally in California started with that big blade. For it to work, you have to have a contrast, white on one side, dark on the other and it has to turn a certain speed or above. And by the way, you can’t turn them too fast. Okay. I’ve seen a couple of guys within the last year recommending that you need to slow the wings down. Dumbest thing I ever heard. You can’t turn them too fast.

Ramsey Russell: Denmon, talk about that a little bit, we’ve talked about this in the past and I want to walk through this because I think you bring up a good thing. That’s kind of sort of how you got into the spinning wing decoy business was over a engineering calculations of wing beat, because one of the first things they figured out with spinning wing decoys, there is a sweet spot, am I right? I mean and you go too slow, you might what be just waving at the duck.

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The dove. Dove hasn’t got no feather detail on the wings and it’s turning about 700 and something. He’s such a little bitty.

Terry Denmon: That’s absolutely correct, Ramsey. But as far as determining what the speed is, it varies on how reflective the material is that join is made out of what your contrast is one side to the other, what the sky conditions are sun, no sun, clouds, fog or something like that. But I’ve studied on that for, I guess, 22 years now, well 23 or 23rd year. And when it gets down around 400 RPMs, then you’re not generating that flash anymore. It’s still a motion decoy, its movement and ducks can see movement 3 or 4 times better than they can see a still object. And you know how funny duck’s eyes is so radically different than our eyes that we get out here and brush our blind, back off, look at it, yeah, that’s great. You better have a duck look at it, which he will the first time you hunt. And they just see things so much differently than we do. But I don’t think you can turn one too fast. But the limit on how fast you can turn one up till now has basically been vibration, noise, that type of stuff. And if you remember, our first wings had that big old lobe on them to make them look like a real duck wing. Stupidest thing we ever did. Stupidest thing everybody ever did. Because you just putting eccentricity in it. You’re just making it vibrate. You’re making it slow down, you’re trying to move more air out of the way. And so, we went to concentric wings, but back to the feather detail that you was talking about when that came out, when someone suggested that I think some little company made wings look like that or something, I don’t know, but the retailers got on it and they wanted it.

Ramsey Russell: I thought it was the best idea since life break because it’s beautiful.

Terry Denmon: I didn’t and the reason I didn’t is because of the flash. And the only reason that I agreed to do that was that it was about the time when everybody said, well, the flash is scaring the ducks and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. So I said, well, you put those feathers on there, it’s going to cut down on the flash and maybe that’ll turn out to be a good thing. It wasn’t. And you need dark on one side, white on the other. What’s the most effective decoy that Mojo’s ever made for a bird?

Ramsey Russell: The dove.

Terry Denmon: The dove. Dove hasn’t got no feather detail on the wings and it’s turning about 700 and something. He’s such a little bitty. And an interesting story with that, I wish Mike Morgan was here because he and I did this together. About 2008, because I got a video of it and it’s got that date on it. I got on to the concept, me and Mike did of super-fast wings. That’s what we talk about right now, turn the wings faster and faster and faster. Okay. And so I said, well, okay, to turn them faster, I need a smaller wing. Okay. For a smaller wing, I need a smaller decoy body. So we made the first green wing teal. And it was not made for teal. It was made to hunt mallards with, I never went mallard hunting in those years without one of those things. But we could not sell to anybody. In fact, one of the major big box stores in their catalog, we told them, said look now, this is for all ducks. And year after year, they’d say it’s for teal. And we still sold a lot of them, but it had super-fast wings. We kind of coined that expression, super-fast wings. But not many people caught on to that back then. They’re kind of onto it now, but they didn’t catch on to it back then, but it’s a phenomenon that’s hard to explain. It really is the spinning wing concept overall. But we do know this birds are attracted to it.

Ramsey Russell: There’s no doubt they are. And I can remember December 1999, January 2000, I was working for US Fish and Wildlife Service, the biologist would pawn off the midwinter waterfowl counts to me because I like ducks more than they did and I loved it. And that was about the year when you started flying 5000 foot fixed wing aircraft over to Mississippi Delta, you’d see these things. And we’d be flying along and one would catch my eye out of peripheral and I would turn my head 50 times to look at it. You could not not look at it. And the times it hypnotized me as we’re flying over and I just watched that thing flashing. But around those same times, this whole spinning wing decoy was a brand new concept to everybody. And there were videos they talked a lot about the flash and the wing beat and that strobe timing and what a lot of folks were posting, I’m sure you can find on YouTube if you look or if you’ve looked, watch ducks through binoculars in low light conditions. When you see Mallards coming in, you don’t see the blue and the white stripes and the gray and the feathered. You see flat. It’s like somebody blinking a white light. That’s what I see is a strobe. That’s what this black and white decoy, the dove and these right here have done. We all came out with a feather detail, I thought it was a great idea. It looked good, it looked realistic. But Terry, I’m getting into a subject, I hear it all the time, spinning wing decoys don’t work in my backyard. Okay, well, I use them. I’m not going to leave my house without a Mojo. Go to Mongolia, Azerbaijan, don’t matter. I got spinning wing decoys packed and what I’m getting at is this one of the first comments, I heard about a year or 2 after the ultra-realistic wings was a lot of my Canadian outfitters were saying, man you know the decoys, the Canada geese and snows aren’t bothered by the spinners like they used to be, but the ducks aren’t decoying to them as well either. And I think just what you said, that lack of contrast was throwing them off a little bit. Now, don’t beat me up, Terry. I know you don’t like me saying this, but you talk about the dove decoy. Sometimes, not everywhere, but some places when I travel, I can’t pack a big Mojo. The airlines are holding me to 50 pounds. I went to Mongolia one time. We were off in BFE, Mongolia, as far and remote as you could possibly be and this was a complete do it yourself hunt. The staff knew where there were ducks, and out of 12 of them, they had one pair of short rubber boots. It was all on us. I packed about a half dozen dove decoys. I knew I could pack them out to the field. I knew I could get them in my suitcase and everything from Eurasian wigeons to pintails to mallards to swan geese, very hard – The only place in the world I know you can hunt them is Mongolia, swan geese, especially, were decoying to them like nobody’s business. And if only we’d had these bigger mallards. I do see times where the little flash, a little wing works better than a big wing and I see times that a big wing works better than a little wing. It’s just today or what is it?

Terry Denmon: Well, my famous saying, as you know is, you can learn as much as you can learn about decoying ducks and of course, you know me and you both have done a whole lot out there, but in the end, you got to let the ducks tell you because they’re different every day. And now, the more you know about them, probably the closer you all get to making the correct setup before daylight, before you start, but after you make the best one you got. And I’ve been doing this for years, you’ve been doing years. Pretty soon, if ducks are not, you all see that they’re not doing what you want to do and you all see they’re all doing the same thing.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Terry Denmon: And so, no, you just sitting there in that blind hoping things going to get better. It’s not going to get better if the weather don’t change. You better get out and see if you can change something.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Terry Denmon: People say, what do you change. I said, I don’t know, I’ll just look at it and see if I can figure out something to change. But If I can’t I just get out and –

Ramsey Russell: You can’t do something, you can just sit there, drink coffee, you go do something. You see it’s been an interesting progression and what I hear you saying, well, you started with the wing shape and you started with the wing color and you did. It’s a learning curve.

Terry Denmon: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: It’s been a learning curve since you started.

Terry Denmon: Yeah, it is. And add to that, the ducks change. Ducks are much more pressured most places. Well, let’s just take the lower Mississippi Flyway where you and I live. You know the pressure there, pretty much phenomenal. If there’s a body of water in my part of the world, North Louisiana, that was attract a duck, there’s a duck blind there and somebody’s trying to kill that duck. Of course, I think it also resulted in fewer ducks. I think the duck whole flyways move west. But I don’t want to debate that today because everybody’s got a different opinion about that.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Bradley Cohen flew some surveys looking at active duck blinds and calculated something like 25 to 27 active duck blinds per square mile of West Tennessee. You wonder why that duck is a mile high?

Terry Denmon: Yeah. When I was on the Wildlife Commission for the State of Louisiana a few years ago, the biologist that did the count up in North Louisiana told me and this is pretty close to a quote. If the number of duck blinds with decoys around them is any indication, the hunting pressure is phenomenal in Northeast Louisiana.

Ramsey Russell: I’m sure it is.

Terry Denmon: That’s pretty close to a quote.

The Strategy Behind Using Spinning Wing Decoys

There’s some statistic, I remember reading one time, some university did research on spinning wing decoys and they attracted 30% or 40% more birds.

Ramsey Russell: I am sure it is. God, there was something I was just fixing to ask. I want to get into talking about everything that’s gone into this new decoy, but I’m liking this topic right here too. Terry, there was some research done one time. Add to the topic spinning wing decoys don’t work. Add to the topic that ducks up there 200 yards but won’t finish. There’s some statistic, I remember reading one time, some university did research on spinning wing decoys and they attracted 30% or 40% more birds. That didn’t mean they finished in your decoys at 10 yards, but it means – and it goes back to that aerial survey I was doing, I could see this thing on a bright day across, I can see it two sections away flipping. And I’ve just got to wonder you know if I’m a duck and I’m going, we all know that ducks are highly follow Patrick. Doug Osborne had one of his bands got shot, 3 years later, 7ft from where it’d been banded. We know these ducks are highly queued into certain properties, but I’ve always wondered, okay, so all of a sudden, there’s this wad of mallards over me looking, it may not be the mallards where – it may not be my mallards, it may be some mallards that just saw me a mile and a half, 2 miles away and said, well, let me go check this out. And my thought has always been, the more ducks I can pull into my sphere of influence, the more chance I got to bring some down and close the deal. But I can’t close the deal on the best of days with all the ducks. I mean, so I’m saying it increases my odds, is why I use Mojo.

Terry Denmon: There’s no question about that encounter to get to the crux of the matter, Ramsey, when spinning wing decoys first came upon the hunting scene, the ducks wanted to land right on top of them. And I mean, like right on top of them. And then, of course, after you shoot so many ducks, if they’re not smart enough to learn that, we wouldn’t have ducks at all would be annihilated by now. But what happened from a hunter’s point of view is that, they caused the hunters to look upon them as a finishing device. And a spinning wing decoy is and always has been is highest and best use as long-range attraction. So when they do start to flare your ducks and when ducks get heavily pressured, they’ve been shot from Alaska all the way through Canada, all the way through the Northern states down here, so they got to think about stuff like that. When they do that and people don’t use them, they say they take them out, take that Mojo out and put it up there. That’s a serious mistake because they’ve given up their long-range attraction. If they don’t want to land within 50 yards of it or 75 yards of it or whatever, move the thing 50 yards or 75 yards, it does not have to be in your decoy spread.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Terry Denmon: I can remember one time we hunted where some water had flooded up into, I think it was a pasture or field or something like that and we had some kind of blind set up on the edge of it. And this was late season last weekend or something like that and they didn’t want to land right there. We took the Mojo and put it 100 yards behind the blind on the ground, on the dry ground. So we still got those ducks from 10 miles over there, 5 miles over there that wouldn’t ever be going to see your decoys. We got them over into our environment and then you can take the rest of your duck hunting skills and see if you can decoy them and land them. But it’s a mistake and I know I’m not the right messenger for that because I make spinning wing decoys, but it’s just true. It’s a fact and they all think about it.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve put it behind trees, I’ve put it in bushes, I put it deep down in coffee weed. A lot of times, just imagine a little cypress hole, little cypress tupelo hole. The ducks are going to come in from right to left. I’ll put it in way off to the right where on 3 quarters of the swing they can see it, but when they come over it, they can’t see it anymore. So they’re not always looking at it. There are little tricks of the trade you can do to this thing. All the duck needs to see is movement, some lively movement, to just get interested. Now it’s up to me to finish the deal. That’s the way I look at it.

Terry Denmon: That’s exactly correct. They can see this so much further than they can see any other thing, any other tool that you have, whether you’re sloshing the water, you’re squirting the water up in there, whatever you’re doing. We call that simple motion. We divide motion into 2 different distinct parts. The spinning wing concept is one and it shouldn’t even be called a motion detour. That’s a misnomer because if it’s operating properly, you don’t see any motion, it’s like lights there. And then the other one we call simple motion. It’s just moving something back and forth like this. And they see that good, but they don’t see it anything close to how they can see that strobe.

Ramsey Russell: How important is the eye, as a hunter and a duck hunter and a lover of ducks appreciate the extreme detail of this new decoy, the feet, the tail? How important is that relative to the wing flash?

Terry Denmon: You already telling the truth, don’t make any difference.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t think it matters.

Terry Denmon: You don’t make any difference. That’s for the customer.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Terry Denmon: And you know me, I’d really have a pretty one than one that’s not pretty myself.

Ramsey Russell: I like looking at it.

Terry Denmon: Yeah, I do, too. But the duck, it doesn’t make any difference with a duck.

Ramsey Russell: It’s all about that flash.

Terry Denmon: Yeah, it is.

Ramsey Russell: The first thing I noticed. I want to talk about this new Mojo Mallard because it is truly in my humble opinion, after 30 years of wagging these things around the world, it’s state of the art. It’s the most perfect spinning wing decoy ever to hit the market. Well, less than except the Spoonzilla, which is a pretty damn good decoy. But seriously, the first thing I noticed, Terry, I’m just going to start here because, when you open the box, it’s upside down in the box and the first thing I saw was these feet staring at me. And it looks like taxidermied feet is what it looks like. I mean, that is realistic, I thought realistic foot. That’s not just a flap of orange hanging down, son. That’s a realistic foot, right?

Terry Denmon: They carved. They were carved by a carver.

Ramsey Russell: And something else, I noticed about it is, it’s attached to the body. I ain’t got to stick it in later if I want to because I got a lot of Mojos ain’t got an orange foot on it.

Terry Denmon: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I just never bothered to stick them in. But that’s a very realistic foot. But I want to walk through this whole decoy right here.

Terry Denmon: You know why we put the feet in the decoy now? Because all these outfitters that’s got all these things, they never put them in. They know they don’t make any difference. They never put it in. And so then you see them on the videos and whatever old Mojo out there without no feet, it just kind of looks a little funky to us.

Ramsey Russell: It does look funky. But I think it’s funny that the very first thing that struck me in this box was when I looked at that that looked like a dang real mallard foot. I touched it. It almost feels like a real mallard foot. But walk me through. I want to hear, after three decades of building the best spinning wing decoys, everything you kept and everything you changed to come up with this truly one of a kind decoy. Where do you want to start? I start with the wings because they’re metal.

Terry Denmon: Yeah. Let me go through from step one, you know when we first made them. And my partner, Murray Crow. You know Murray and he deserves more credit than anybody about this because, he built the first Mojo Mallard. Jeff’s Simmons Sporting Goods was trying to get him to build him some, you couldn’t buy some.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a great story if nobody’s ever heard.

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So he cocked the head over, but then he straightened the head up. Instead of the body being straight and the head looking over, he straightened the head up, made the body lean over, and we’ve got a few people.

Terry Denmon: They’re making a few of them in California. But you couldn’t get your hands on one of them. So Jeff, somebody brought one on Jeff’s hunt, and he knows. He calls Murray gives him one of these decoys. That’s an old fatal deduction decoy. We happen to now own that company, so I can call. I’m not saying anything about anybody else’s property, but it was one of them kind had a small, high speed motor to slow it down they put parallel pulleys. The drive belt was an O ring. And so the motor was going like that. And if it wind blew, it got wet, It froze. Anything wouldn’t run because a little transmission system, the little belt, wouldn’t do it. But anyway, Jeff wanted him to build some and he got some motors, little motors like that. But he didn’t know how to size the pulleys. And so he and I have been friends since little bitty kids and hunted all the world together. And, I was in the engineering business, so he just called me and started telling me about this duck decoy. And I was, tell me again about that. That’s the craziest thing I ever heard, I didn’t think they’d work. Sounded stupid to me. And he said, well, I don’t know about all that. I said, yeah, I can size these pulleys, don’t worry about that. I said, I’ll come up to your shop tomorrow. And the shop was about 15 miles from my engineering comes. I’ll come to your shop tomorrow noon, and I’ll do that. So, we looked at it and decided it was the wrong thing to do. And I really didn’t have anything to do with that direct drive school. Murray says, he said, I know how to fix that, you come back tomorrow. Okay. It was his project, I left and he had some double shafted blower motors. You remember how big those motors were?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terry Denmon: They were a double shafted blower motor out of a caterpillar cab. And he grew up on – his family had huge farms. They had drag lines and all that other stuff. And he built dirt track cars. And so he had these sheets of aluminum there. That’s what they’d wrapped dirt track race cars in back then. So he took that and made the wings out of Aluminum, which I don’t know what his thought process was, but as it turns out, you need the denser material you got, the better you are

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Denmon: And then he got on his way. He could build anything. Got on his way, made them wing shafts. But he just put them in any kind of decoy. If you got one that year, it’d be any kind of different decoy. They would all look like –

Ramsey Russell: You could get your hand on the hen.

Terry Denmon: It might be a hen sitting on the water, whatever. You could put the motor in there. And, of course, you couldn’t make the thing not run. I mean, that big old motor had a 6 volt Leonard battery in there, kind of with little wire terminals and you couldn’t make it not run. You drop it in the water and it’s still down there trying to run. We got a patent on that concept and we couldn’t have much competition because of that. And so we kept on making that pretty much, except like the third year, we molded a body that looks pretty much like this.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Denmon: That’s about the only change we made in it. Well, when you got an exclusive on something, it doesn’t cause you to develop things like you should. You’d be protected or something like that. So we really didn’t upgrade in the first few years as much as we should. But I finally got to seeing that the way it was built. He cut the back out of it, put the motor in there, hooked the motor to the body, put a battery in there, put the wings onto the shelves coming out the side. The hooking the motor to the body was the worst thing. That’s just what you don’t want to do. Think of your car. If your motor and your car was hooked to the body instead of the frame, what would you have, you wouldn’t have nothing. So I always wanted to fix that problem and I finally did with that elite series where I designed that, where I put the motor and everything in that little housing, I just wrapped that flexible body around it. It made it a lot smoother and stuff like that. But those things are rotomolded and rotomold won’t hold a lot of detail.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Denmon: So I wanted to make a detailed one, a highly detailed one. And so nowadays – Well, let me back up a minute, all those decoys you’ve been hunting with are blow-molded. They blow plastic up into a mold and they harden and whatever, but now they’ve got so many different kinds of material. This is a blended material, part PE.

Ramsey Russell: The detail is amazing.

Terry Denmon: And you can see, you can mash that a little bit, it’s not as hard as it was, but it’ll hold detail. So my concept on this decoy here was to go back to the original Mojo Mallard as closely as we could. And we get a lot of requests from that for 22 years now, people saying, bring that old Mojo Mallard back. But it’s pretty crude. If you got yours out today and looked at it, you’d say, well, it was a good decoy, but it’s pretty crude and it was. And I said, let’s make a Mojo Mallard and let’s add modern technology to it.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, you did. But beyond the body, beyond the detail, who was the carver of this decoy? It’s just amazing.

Terry Denmon: Mark Shoot.

Ramsey Russell: He gave it a lot of personality.

Terry Denmon: He did. Yeah, he did.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the first thing I noticed when I stood it up, is, man, this thing’s got some attitude.

Terry Denmon: He called us up, and he said, what do you all think about cocking this thing over? Man, I wish I could show people this.

Ramsey Russell: Like, he’s pitching a little bit.

Terry Denmon: Yeah. Mallards coming in, they doing this, now they came to see what I’m doing here, but I’m just rocking back and forth and that’s what they’re doing. Tell you what, it’s different, let’s do different. So he cocked the head over, but then he straightened the head up. Instead of the body being straight and the head looking over, he straightened the head up, made the body lean over, and we’ve got a few people. I don’t know if I’ll like that, but it’s new. People don’t like new stuff sometimes and it’ll catch on and it’ll be fine.

Ramsey Russell: We know, somebody asked me, why is that angle? I’m like, what are you talking about? I stuck it out there and it’s angled – it’s like he’s literally cupped. I didn’t even notice it because it looks like a mallard cupped.

Terry Denmon: That’s what it is.

Ramsey Russell: I didn’t know what he’s talking about. But beyond that, Terry, talk about these wings, because some of those first wing incarnations, metal wing incarnations, if you didn’t baby them, they would get out of sync or something.

Terry Denmon: They got a harmonic sound. They made a harmonic sound and you could not make. You can bend that thing back everywhere you want to.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it won’t no get them back.

Terry Denmon: Didn’t seem to bother the ducks at all, but it worried me a good bit.

Ramsey Russell: But you all put some engineering on here to where this wing is not going to bend.

Terry Denmon: No, we put this ridge in it. We formed this ridge in it, in this big heavy thing here and see, we got one of them on both sides. Instead of just hooking it to this one, we sandwiched it in between that and then we put this ridge in it to keep it from flexing.

Ramsey Russell: It’s beautiful. And it’s got the bullet design, what do you call that design, the shape of that wing, that’s very like a dove, it’s a fluid.

Terry Denmon: It’s a novel. It’s not an novel, but people call it a novel. But our original wings had that lobe on it. If you look at a real duck’s wing, it’s wide up here and it curves in towards the end. So it had a lobe on it. So we put a lobe on it to make it look like a duck’s wing. But that was the wrong thing to do, because it just added eccentricity to it and made vibrations and whatever. So we’ve abandoned that. You can turn this wing so much faster and so much smoother.

Ramsey Russell: It’s more energy efficient because I did, I forgot my charger at home. But it ran 4 and half or 5 and half hunts, long hunts, before it just ran out of juice. That’s a long time. 5 or 6 hunts, that’s a week’s worth of hunt.

Plug & Play: Lithium-Ion Powered Decoys

The difference between, from a use point of view, the difference between a lithium ion and say a sealed lead acid battery.

Terry Denmon: Let me touch on that for a minute. This duck has a lithium ion battery. They’re getting to be real popular. And the difference between, from a use point of view, the difference between a lithium ion and say a sealed lead acid battery, what we’ve been doing before or nickel metal hydrides double ace you use or any of those, the minute you start putting an amp draw on those, they start losing voltage. And voltage is what’s determining the speed on a DC motor, the motor turns proportionate to the voltage that you put to it. And so on a sealed lead acid battery or AA’s, as it starts running, it starts slowing down. And your batteries don’t – If you let your decoy run until it just stops with a sealed lead acid battery, you did the wrong thing because at some point in there, it quit turning, the speed that it needs to be turning. Well, lithium ion battery and we all know this, because you drill today, or your blower or your hedger, it just runs until it stops. And that’s what a lithium ion does. A 6 volt lithium ion battery is going to hold 6 volts until it stops. And I saw some curves on them and there is a little bit of loss in it, but not enough to matter. And so, it’s going to keep that speed up till it stops. You can hunt with this decoy until it quits running, because 1 minute before it quit running, it was still generating a flash. And that’s not true of any other battery.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to open up. And I like the way you’ve got – on the back end, I love this attachment. I love the sturdiness of how I access the guts. There, I’ve got my battery. I guess it all comes with this remote now. What is this right here?

Terry Denmon: That’s a remote. It’s plug in, it’s just a plug in remote.

Ramsey Russell: It’s modular. Plug and play.

Terry Denmon: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: If you look, wire and hammer type mechanic, you all finally made this thing where I can fix it or make it run or do something and I’m not going to lose my key, the way I keep it in there. But that’s pretty ingenious and I wish you’d sent me one of the motors, what do you call the system? The guts of this. What are the guts called?

Terry Denmon: Well, it’s a housing.

Ramsey Russell: The housing.

Terry Denmon: Okay. Everything other than that body is in that housing. It’s got a motor saddle. You set the motor in, you put the top straps on the motor saddle, strap it in tight. The battery boxes is molded into it. The receiver hitch is molded into it. All the wires, you don’t see any loose wires. We all got this single male plug in, very durable wires. You can’t hook it up backwards or anything because you just plug one wire into one hole and it’s done for you. But the whole concept, Ramsay and this is patent penned, unfortunately, is you take all that that I just described, that whole housing, you slide it on the inside. The peg, as you can see, is mounted separate. It’s just a piece by itself.

Ramsey Russell: If it does break, I can just get a new one, put it right on there.

Terry Denmon: You can and I don’t think you won’t break that, but if you happen to and it did then it’s got a little elastomeric bearing peg in there. So we screw the peg from the outside to the housing with a little pad between them and the body is just clamped between all this. So now you’re back to where the peg and the stake are actually holding all this up the bottom is not holding –

Ramsey Russell: I can take these 4 screws out and take the whole housing out?

Terry Denmon: That’s correct.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, now I understand. That’s what those screws are for.

Terry Denmon: That’s correct.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be dang.

Terry Denmon: You slide this up in here, you put the little pad in it.

Ramsey Russell: You smarter than you look Terry.

Terry Denmon: Thank goodness. What if I was as dumb as I look like I am, I’d be in rough shape then, wouldn’t it. And then you squeeze them together and that’s it. And you can see there’s a big void in it. There’s a reinforced hub in here, where this peg is hooking onto this housing.

Ramsey Russell: You showed me the housing, the other day at the office and that motor itself is waterproof. If I do drop this into water and it sometimes happens because I hunt over water, the motor itself is waterproof.

Terry Denmon: Yeah, the weak link in it all was, of course, electronics. You can only do so much to waterproof electronics
Ramsey Russell: Don’t mix with water.

Terry Denmon: Yeah, they don’t. But then we dropped the genome in the water and pulled them out and they run. We’ve got them out the next spring and they ran. But you can fry your control board, you let a PC control board.

Ramsey Russell: And what is this red wire sticking out back here?

Terry Denmon: Well, that’s so when you drop it in the water and it won’t run anymore. That’s called emergency wire. You pull this black wire out of your battery, you take this red one and stick into it. I’m not going to do it now because, the second I stick it in, then wings going to start running. And so what it does, it just hooks your motor directly to your battery, you don’t have any electronics left, you don’t have a switch, you don’t have a PC board, you don’t have a timer, you don’t have a remote, you don’t have nothing. But if that happens to you out in the field, you can plug the thing in, make it work until you can get to town and fix whatever it is that you broke while you were out in the water.

Ramsey Russell: It’s like you all really took 3 decades of everything you all have done with a Mojo, from the wings to the detail, the feet, the motor, the housing, everything you’ve just said, all these problems, everything that can go wrong and has gone wrong, we’re going to fix.

Terry Denmon: That’s correct. And this has been my project. I’ve been working on this for several years. Of course, when you do something like that and it’s brand new and nobody’s ever done it before, you don’t really know exactly how it’s going to come out. But, I haven’t got any bad reviews. We had those 50. We gave you one of that we hunted with this year kind of advanced models. But, when you called me up and told me, said, Terry, this is the best decoy ever seen, that’s what made me feel good. Because I have a lot of respect for you, Ramsey, because I know that you know better or worse than that. You tell it straight. If that hadn’t been no good, you’d have said, Denmon, this decoy ain’t worth a dirt.

Earliest Memories of Hunting Over Decoys

I remember those days. It’s a beautiful decoy.

Ramsey Russell: No, actually, I’m going to tell you my earliest memories of using this decoy, the hunts I was doing it, we hit the old south mallards coming down because that ice was right, and the hunts were, this decoy worked. I mean, one particular day was kind of slow with the, we didn’t limit, but there were mallards and gadwalls and the ones that hit it. I mean, they come from stratospheric, I called a flock of gadwalls. And I cannot remember in 20 years of time I’ve done this, seen a flock that, if you squint, you kind of see them at you under about a half mile. And I’m absolutely stood on that call like I ain’t done since the good old days. And they came and they got over and they circled a hole and they came right in, coming down like that Mojo was just pulling them on a string, coming right to the decoy. And every duck that came in that morning, big duck, did the same thing. I’m like, man, this thing is working like I remember, the old days and I love it here. I’m not going to lie to you. And that decoy is not quite as big as the – you all got a humongous mallard? That’s not decoy is not quite as big.

Terry Denmon: No, it’s not. And that was the original Mojo Mallard. But we started off just buying decoys wherever we could, cutting them open, putting the motor as best we could do, until we molded the very first Mojo Mallard we molded, a guy from Italy molded that for us. And it worked a whole lot better once we got a decoy made for what we’re doing, but it didn’t work near as good as this one. As many ducks as original Mojo Mallard call, it was kind of noisy once you bent that wing a little bit. And back then we had those old thumb screws to hold the wings on, remember that?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terry Denmon: So they were such a pain, nobody would take the wing.

Ramsey Russell: Drop one of them in a rice pile in the morning, you screwed.

Terry Denmon: Well you get you a bag full of them and carry them in a Ziploc bag. That’s what I did.

Ramsey Russell: I remember those days. It’s a beautiful decoy. I’m not bullshitting. When I say this is state of the art and I’m holding it up, you’re looking at it. That’s a cup duck coming in. Somebody said, the reason it was angled is so you could tip it in the water make it splash.

Terry Denmon: Well, the reason they said that was because I was in Mexico, early December and shooting a little freshwater pond and there wasn’t a breath of wind. I meant you could blow your cigarette smoke out, got forbid and it wouldn’t go anywhere. And so the ducks was coming. They were locked onto it and they were coming, but they didn’t want to finish. They’d get down there and they didn’t like the looks of it and they’d fly off. We still kill them, but I don’t like to hunt like that. I want them to put their feet down, set in a decoy. So I had my cameraman, I didn’t had a waders on, my cameraman sitting there, Jared. I said, Jared, go out there and lean that decoy over to that tip of that water, tip of that one. Now, we did that with the old Mojo Mallard. So I didn’t think of it right then, I already knew that. And actually, I saw Phil Robertson do that first many years ago. So he did, when he got out there, he couldn’t even understand what I’m trying to say. I said, Jared, lean the darn thing over until the tip of the wing hits the water. And it was making ripples and throwing ripples up in the air, droplets up in the air. And that’s a pretty effective decoy deal because the sun hits those droplets and them ducks can detect that. And so the ducks already working different. We killed, of course, they have high limits.

Ramsey Russell: They see that motion on the water.

Terry Denmon: They see that motion on the water. Yeah. Now the decoys start looking like real ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Terry, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for your product. Thank you for your – I love working with a company that’s just always stepping up the game, you know what I’m saying, because life itself is a learning curve, but products are a learning curve and these ducks aren’t getting no dumber. But in my humble opinion, you all knocked it out of the park with this, second only to that world famous Spoonzilla.

Terry Denmon: Spoonzilla. You can’t beat that, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: The next thing I want to see is a state of the art Spoonzilla.

Terry Denmon: How about a state of the art Ramzilla?

Ramsey Russell: Ramzilla. Thank you very much, Terry. Folks, you all been listening to my buddy, Mr. Terry Denmon of Mojo outdoors. Check out the new Mojo Mallard. Put your hands on it. Turn it on, listen, we’ve turned it on a few times. I bet you didn’t hear it, did you? Because it’s silent. It’s utterly silent. I didn’t even mention the glass eyes. It looks like a taxidermy duck with those glass eyes or whatever that is what –

Terry Denmon: That’s what’s attracting the ducks, is that glass eye.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, they get close enough to see that they’re tits up, kicking the air. But anyway, folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere, see you next time.