Steve Mitchell


[Roll Call ]

Posted by Steve Mitchell on November 01, 2000 at 2:03:04 p.m.:

I have been duck hunting off and on for the last 9 years. Nobody in my family hunts so it's been up to me to learn how. I am really pumped about building my own boat but it will have to wait till I move to Washington and get back from a deployment to Japan. I have been married almost two years to a great gal named Tanya. We have our first child on the way and are extremely excited. Goose is my 5 year old duck-spooking partner in crime. Duck hunting is my absolute favorite thing. I hunt deer in Wisconsin with my brother in law and usually have to scratch a fly-fishing itch every spring, but ducks is where it's at. I shoot the toughest gun ever made, 870 12 ga. and it has done just as well on deer as it has on the ducks. I'm a Naval Flight Officer, LTJG, and I hope my career takes me to some good ducking around the country. When i was a kid in Olympia, WA we lived on a bluf overlooking an inlet that always had some birds on it and I thought it would be good for me to hunt on our bulkhead even though our housing development did not allow shooting. I checked with the game dept. and was pleased to find out that it was legal where we lived. I grabbed my shotgun one day and decided I was going hunting on the neighbors bulkhead since they were not in the same development. bear in mind this was not by any means a rural area. I sat on the bulkhead for about 20 mins. and was getting nervous about doing this when I saw what I now know was a cormorant and opened fire. At that moment i realized that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. I was 14 then and it wasn't till this summer that I told my Dad what I did, I'm now 28. He laughed, but I know that if he found out then my 870 would have done a 1/2 gainer into Puget Sound and still be there today. You all seem like a great bunch of guys and I hope to hunt with some of you someday.

Steve