All I can say is WOW! The water’s up and the birds are thick. We hunted 4 days in central ND. (Around the Woodward area.) My brother and I shot full bags every day with some geese thrown in for good measure. The one thing I noticed was that ND has more publc land now than they ever have. In the past 2 seasons the PLOTS land has doubled in the are we hunt. Whatever incentive there giving the farmers is working.
We hit the road early Firday morning for a preopener shouting mission. While on the road we found that the grain was pulled and the beans were on the way out. We decided to look for one good field for a morning hunt and a number of small sloughs near beans for puddle ducks. The tough part wasn;t finding areas to hunt. 
It was deciding which ones we wanted to hunt the most. 
Needless to say we were like two kids in a candy store. Sat AM we hit the road early for a slough we found that sat between 2 big bodies and some beans. We quickly noticed that the birds wanted NOTHING to do with our calls! From that point forward they rarely came out. When hunting duck we spent most of our week on water that was small enough to shoot across from all sides. For us that means 20 yds. (We preffer not taking shots longer than that.) This pattern worked for all 4 days of hunting.
The only exception was the morning we decided to field hunt. While on our scouting mission we found a cut grain feild that was HUGE! I figure it had to be 1 mile by 2 miles in size. What a beautiful way to spend a morning. The night before we headed over to pick a spot. WE decided on a rise that sat almost dead center in the middle of this feild. This decision proved to be good and BAD! It was great because we whacked the geese and a couple of mallards. The bad was that we were in the middle of a field with roughly a mile back to the truck.
All in all it was a great trip with family and freinds. The only realy suprise was deisel. $2.25 on the low end $2.39 on the high end! 
I’m not sure how to post the pictures I have but there coming. I’ll see if one of the moderators can give me a hand. 
What a great suprise. 
