<font size="-1" face="verdana,arial,helv">Yes, I believe wholeheartedly that banning mud motors on public waters from November through February would do wonders for reducing disturbances on wintering waterfowl which would, in turn, increase the wintering population of all waterfowl in South Carolina.Originally posted by JABIII:
Rubberhead, are mud motors really that much of a problem that they should be outlawed? Granted, I have only ever seen one on the water and it DID sound much like a riding lawnmower coming up the river for what seemed like forever, but are they impacting the resource negatively in some areas?
I ask you because I know that you, unlike many on this site, put the welfare of the ducks FIRST and I can get an unbiased view. You are not the first to mention banning mud motors and I hear it more and more on the list of what needs to be done to relieve pressure on a migratory waterfowl population that has plummeted.
Many of us remember when airboats were outlawed in some areas of the state. Has the time come to take a serious look at mud motors and their impact?
In the early ‘90s (1992 I think), I bought a Go-Devil directly from Warren Coco, when there were ducks-a-plenty on the Cooper River and on Lake Moultrie and few hunters. Almost immediately, I started killing noticeably more than my share of ducks. I am not so pretentious to think that I helped start the mud motor fad, but I was in fact, a couple of years ahead of the fat part of the Go-Devil bell curve.
I quickly learned that I could drive directly into the big raft of wigeon in Ricehope and be set-up and ready to hunt before the birds could circle once. I could power through hydrilla and hunt back coves on Lake Moultrie where no one else could even go. On Saturday’s I was the first one to reach the center of the Hatchery where the big ducks were. For a year or two, I was killing a pintail almost every Saturday mostly because I had one of the few mud motors around.
After reaching an easy 3-bird limit, I would ride around the rest of the morning running birds out of every nook and cranny on whatever body of water I happened to be hunting. Thinking back, I realize that one person with one mud motor could disturb every bird on half of Lake Moultrie with less than a gallon-and-a-half of gas. Multiply that times hundreds of mud motors and we’ve got a serious problem.
For the record, I stopped hunting with the Go-Devil in 1996 after watching someone else hunt the ducks in Ricehope using “my” mud motor method. Somehow, when I was doing it, it didn’t seem so bad. Watching someone else stir up clouds of ducks with little effort disgusted me.
I am back to scouting with the heel of my boots, a good pair of binoculars and a water-cooled Evinrude. I can only check two holes in a morning rather than 10 per hour, but I’m much happier and, I believe, a better hunter.
Sorry to be so long winded, but, yes, I believe mud motors are a bad thing.
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