Today is Sunday, but that won’t stop the work that we need to get done down on the duck club.  We have a small work crew going down to clean our a ditch in order to get water to come over onto our club property.  We have about 20 acres with three small and shallow ponds built that are completely dry right now.  Add some water to those ponds and we will have ducks coming in on a regular basis.  Of course it will also stop the use of motorized vehicle travel across our place as well.  As dry as it is right now, Bob and I were able to drive his pickup truck all over the club property without any concern of breaking through the crust and getting stuck.  All that changes when water is added.

Back when the club was first moved from its location now under the water of Willard Bay, to where it is today, they had a very dry year and were able to put in seven cement boxes.  Those boxes were where the hunters hid from the unsuspecting birds.  Back in about 1983 and a few years before then, the Great Salt Lake water level rose to a record high and completely covered our club property.  It was so high it was threatening Interstate 15 on the East.  I recall in the winter of 1983, the ice sheet that formed on that lake water was about a foot thick and in the early Spring it broke up with some strong Southern winds.  Those winds pushed those big chunks of ice to the North and East and completely flattened everything in its path.  It took down huge power line towers and the building and outsheds of a duck club that is adjacent to ours.  Everything in the ice’s path was flattened!

The salty water of the GSL also killed millions of carp and catfish that lived in the brackish waters of the Bear River arm of the lake and deposited them along the Eastern shore….What a stinking mess that was for several months!

Well, those days of an over filled lake and dead fish are long behind us and it doesn’t look like anytime soon we will have a flooding situation again.  The Willard Bay Gun Club has rebuilt their buildings and re-established their club property.  The land all around has regrown into what I call a “mess” with phragmity (sp) filling in spots it shouldn’t be.  The bullrush has come back, as well as the toolies we are so used to hunting in.  The ducks and geese are doing very well and life is good.

Before any vegetation came back we were on the hunt to locate the seven boxes that we knew were out there under the mud.  We did manage to find all seven and we cleaned out the ones that were usable.  We also put in a few more wooden boxes and diked up around them for shallow ponds.  It’s a great place to hunt ducks, “when there is water”.  And that is why we are on our work party for today!

We petitioned and got accepted to receive waste water from the local sewer processing plant, and that is the water we are hoping to get running across our club.  Your first thought is probably “Yuk!  Who would want that running across the club?  Nothing like setting your decoys among a bunch of floating brownies”!  Well trust me with this one, they say the quality of the water coming out of the sewer plant is the cleanest water of any sewer plant in the state!  They have the strictest standards of any plant.  No browns will come floating down!

Well, It’s time to go and maybe later I’ll have some pictures to post up in this story.

This is the track hoe that Doug Younger used to dig the ditch.  I’m just estimating the length of the ditch that he dug, but it was over 1,000 feet and he did an excellent job of keeping it pretty even all the way to the top.  The amount of water the ditch will carry isn’t much, but it will be a steady flow and will flood across our club property and create some excellent duck hunting opportunity.

Looking East, the ditch parallels our property boundary on the South and terminates at the road the Lovelands have going across their place.

And in the West direction it goes out to a Phragmities patch that I cut down with the brush hog.  There the ditch turns South into our place.

Doug also took some time to plug off a pipe that carries water across the main parking lot and dumps into the channel.  The water will have a very tough time going in that direction now, but it will be an easy dig out should the need arise in the future.  As for now, we feel we need all the water we can get for the club to be what it needs to be.  Later in the week I’ll go down and take some pictures of the water flowing in this ditch and post them up on here.  The ground is so very dry right now the flow will soak into the ground for a long time before it progresses down the ditch and across our place.  Looking into the boxes we have dug the ground water level is down about 6 feet.  We need a lot of rain to make a difference in that.

But, because of the dry conditions, I was able to get the brush hog in and take out some of the problem growth around a couple of the boxes.  They are now ready for the flooding and will make for some great late season hunting.

A big THANK YOU to Doug Younger for his day and the use of his equipment to make this happen.

Bears Butt

Oct. 12, 2014