Wildfowling Around the World
| This story has a perfectly ordinary beginning. It is the tale of a
perfectly ordinary wildfowler based in east-central Scotland. Then, by
one of those extraordinary co-incidences, a chance encounter occurred
that was to take the wildfowler to distant places where he would
experience the very cream of fowling and meet some of the world's
keenest waterfowl hunters.
Briefly I will describe that chance happening but then the reader is invited to browse through the four main chapters of this story. To cut a long tale short, my wife and I were amongst the lucky ones to benefit from Hoover's "Free Flights" offer back in 1993. Courtesy of the carpet-sweeper company, we found ourselves flying from the UK to Orlando, Florida whereupon we rented a car and set out for a two-week tour of the Southern States of the USA. On that vacation we visited Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana but, for the purposes of this story we need only be concerned with our short stay in Charleston, S.C. After booking into a motel in Mount Pleasant, we drove into the city centre and sought out the Charleston Visitor Centre to find out what there might be to see and do in that city. On arrival at the Visitor Centre we discovered that the car park was closed due to construction work and we had to drive around the block to find a parking space in a back street. Fortunately we found a vacant meter in King Street - right outside a shop front which bore the legend "South Carolina Waterfowl Association". In we went - and were made very welcome by the staff. Coffee and chat took up longer than expected but it was a great way to spend an afternoon. Anyway, after we returned to the UK I received a phone call from the Director of the SCWA explaining that their big fundraiser each year was a Sportsman's Banquet each February at which they had an auction. Might I, he wondered, be able to host a week's "hunting" in Scotland for two of their members as an auction item? In return, they would be happy to reciprocate by hosting a week shooting waterfowl and deer in South Carolina for myself and a friend. That was how it started and it has led directly to the adventures you will read about on the following pages. See what I mean about chance co-incidences? If that car park at the Charleston Visitor Centre had not been dug up, none of this would have happened. Read on: |
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