With some 21,000 acres of surface waters shining up into the faces of V-shaped flocks of waterfowl, one would think a huge reservoir like Enid Lake would be a duck destination.
Well, it is and it isn’t.
“It can be very difficult to successfully duck hunt Enid Lake because, first and foremost, this lake is a flood-control lake,” Oakland’s Tommy Hoff said. “That means every winter the water level is drawn down. Unless the water is unusually high, the only water is out in the main body of the lake completely surrounded by mud flats.
“This means that the only ducks that can really be hunted are in the beaver ponds and shallow creeks that polka-dot around the lake. These are mostly wood ducks and mallards.”
That doesn’t stop Hoff, however.
“I walk in to areas where others are not willing to go with just three or four decoys,” he explained. “It is not very often that I shoot a limit of birds, but on the rare occasion that I do shoot a limit, it is so much more rewarding than an easy hunt.”
Everything changes whenever the lake actually holds water.
“When the rare high-water winter does happen, the hunting opportunities on the lake improve greatly,” he said. “Duck hunting on the lake is at its best when a hard freeze locks up the shallow, flooded fields in the lake’s delta area, forcing the ducks to find deep sources of water that have not yet frozen up.”
Hoff also pointed out that some years when higher-water conditions exist on the lake that he shifts his duck-hunting strategy to hunting coves using temporary blinds set up within the natural bank vegetation.
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