Not your typical Sunday :(

[Wolfer1199]

     I live down in Rochester, but i recently moved to MN from Colorado. I consider myself an avid outdoorsmen, confident of my knowledge in rules and regulations, as well as the basic principle of right and wrong. In CO i have never really had problems with confrontation or severe congestion. Occasionally the WMA might get busier than i would prefer. But, i've never had any really bad confrontations with other outdoorsmen or women. Not until this last weekend.
     It started when my cousin calls me during the week and says that he wants to go hunting to Rice Lake up by Little Falls. Truthfully i was a bit surprised he would want to go up there typically he is a strict private land hunter, and I'm pretty new to MN and I've even heard of the pressure that Rice and Skunk get. He tells me that he knows a spot that most people won't go to, he said that he found it a while back and is pretty sure we could do really well. So i head to the cities Friday night, and first thing Saturday morning i found myself hunting with the crowd on Rice. We ended limiting out on ducks in 2hrs and we shoot a couple geese that decided to take a close look.
     We decided to go back out again Sunday. We figured we should get out there even earlier in order to get the same spot especially since poeple say us leave the day before. So we hit the water around 430. We got to our spot with no problems and sat and listened to the ducks all around us for awhile. An hour before shooting we started slinging decoys. It was an average spread of 2-2 1/2 dozen. We got them set pretty quickly and got back in the boat. We heard a mud motor making its way toward us, so we did what every duck hunter would do and we shined the heck out of them with 15 million candle power. The prevebial dog markng his territory. We're all guilty of it. What happened next was unbeliavable.
     The boat continued right at us, all the while were yelling and shining. He pulls into our decoys and kills the engine about 10 yards from us. We could distinctly make out 4 guys in 2 different boats. One boat was towing the other. An older gentleman stands up and says "you guys are on my property, you need to pack up your decoys and  leave, we allowed someone else to stay here yesterday, but today we're kicking you out." I immediately reply by saying "you should come on over here and check my boat, it's floating, and if it's floating here on Rice then i'm still on public land." He shouts back "well your wrong and i'm going to call the CO if you don't leave." I reply  "please do, i think you are in for a surprise." A couple moments go by and another guy stands up and says "you guys aren't making very good head way." My cousin chimes in sayting "we aren't making head way because we're not leaving." Thats when the truth came out. The older guy says "we own the land on both sides of you." I then reply by saying "So you show up late, launch your boat on a public lake, and expect to kick someone else off the lake because you some property by the water, it sounds like you made a bad purchase." The two guys in the tow boat say their going a little ways down. The other two pull their boat on shore about 20yds from us and get out. They russle through the weeds and one of them sets up 10yds away from us looking over our decoys. the other walk behind us and stops shines his light directly at us and loads his gun. He walks 10yds past us and stops there. Then he picks up a walkie talky and he distinctly says "if either of those guys or their dog set one foot on our property there going to regeret it." By now its about 30 minutes before shooting. I immiediately pick up my phone and call 911.
     The dispatcher tells me she will get a hold of an officer and get him in touch with us as soon as possible. a couple minutes later the CO calls me and says he's already on Rice and is on his way toward us, we just need to shine him when he gets close. He pulls up and the two guys plead their story that we were  trespassing and we need to leave and that we deserve tickets. Instead the officer tickets both of them for the use of the walkie talkys to coordinate. And he also tickets the one guy for loading his gun early, because he neglected to unload when the officer pulled up. He tells them to make some distance between us and them. So they both spread out 20 yards farther from us. the officer tells us that he can't make them move farther from us because they are on their property.
     We only shot 2 ducks that day. The other 2 guys they were with sounded like they were doing very well. The two guys stayed there until noon, that was when when we left, it started to rain, the ducks weren't flying, and we weren't in the mood to endure anymore. Neither of the two guys killed anything while we were there. So what was their point? It wasn't as if in the heat of the moment they did something rash, they chose to continue their stupidity long into the day. I willingly admit i said some dumb things to them. But, i was quickly able to admit my mistake, why weren't these guys able to see their wrong doing and make some effort to correct it? I sure hope that this was a freak occurrence , or MN may not be a place i want to continue to enjoy the outdoors. The outdoors has always been about peace, freedom, and fun, i shouldn't have to fear being shot or beat up by another. I guess i learned something from this experience, from now on i will consciouly think "am i harming anyone by what i am doing."

[tmjhamann]

please don't think that every MN is that way.Some people just don't have any  and need to get there head out of there  :censored:es.Sooner or later they will do that to the wrong person and will get what they have coming 

[deadeye]

I certianly wouldn't say it's standard, but I know it happens.  It's strange but hunting sometimes brings out the worst (and often the best) in people.  I'm glad you were able to contact a CO and got the situation resolved.  Well, handled somewhat anyway.  I apologize for the jerks that tried to push you off your legal spot.  I hope they learned something.

[finch]

on the flip side, you never know who's going to snap at you.  look what happened in Wisconsin a few years ago...

[Cody Gruchow]

these are the reasons i hunt private land. it seems like every time i go and do something on public land im always harrassed for some reason by some person. just like our land up north connects to state land and our neighboor is an anti so he will do everything in his power to ruin a hunt for me or my uncle whenever he can, one time he even followed my tracks all the way to my deer stand and pushed it over and trashed it, but no proof it was him so nothing i could do. he followed my tracks in the snow also to were i was sitting, because its easyier to take the trail from the state land to that stand on our land and i informed him if i seen him tresspassing again ill call the sheiriff and the CO because of hunter harrassment. its just the bad guys that show themselves more often. its not all Minnesotans just a bad bunch here or there

[Wolfer1199]

I suppose its good to hear that it's not always like that. At some point i'm sure that most outdoorsman will have a run in in with someoone that isn't concerned with hunting, but more concerned about themselves and who they can bully. Probably just wrong place and wrong time, probably could happen to anyone.

[guythathunts]

Those guys sound like a treat. You did the right thing by calling. They pry feel like a bunch of idiots. I hope they have to explain to their wives/parents why they got the tickets in the first place. You met some real idiots. We are not all like that. I think you should give up the cordinants. I'll camp there for a month straight!

[buck12]

Yeah, not everyone in MN is like that.  I had that same thing happen to me, not to that extreme though.  I was hunting a WMA around the area I grew up.  I knew that it was open to all public people.  Well, the three of us got up early so we could be the WMA by 5.  We knew that this was probably our best bet to get a good spot.  On our way out to our spot it started to pour.  We decided to just sit in the weeds for a little bit to try to wait out the rain.  While we were sitting there a guy walked up on us.  He asked us where we were going and we told him the exact spot we were headed to. Back in the bay on a point. His reply was that that was where he was going and being he was there the day before he had soul right to the area.  We knew that this was just him trying to scare us off.  After about 15 minutes of trying to figure out who got to hunt the spot I decided to offer him what I thought the best resolution was.  I told him that we should all just go back there and hunt together.  It would be the safest thing and there would be no one mad.  Well it turned out that he wanted to go to a different side of the bay as us.  And he refused to go to the side that we wanted to.  As it turned out, guess where all the ducks went.  Yup, to the side that we wanted to be on.  His comment was well if you guys would have told me sooner I would have went.  That really upset us.  But, we did shoot 3 ducks and 2 geese in the spot we were in.  It turned out okay, but could have been a lot better.