Curtains for Ducks

An Ocracoke guide has unique blinds that mean close shots and full bags for waterfowl hunters — if they overcome their reluctance to step inside.

Leggett Lump is hardly even that. While nobody really knows where the name originated, the “lump” is a slight rise in the bottom of a couple of inches in height above the surrounding expanse of Pamlico Sound.

While some might call the rise in the bottom a sand bar, it doesn’t qualify in the dictionary of native O’coa’kers. Capt. Wade Austin negotiated a shallow pathway only he knew to Leggett Lump. A fourth-generation resident of the barrier island, the 38-year-old lives in a house on property handed down from his grandfather. While luxurious mansions locals dubbed “motel-ominiums” spring up around him, he makes a living the old way, guiding waterfowl hunters and taking vacationing tourists for tours of Portsmouth Island. “It’s over there somewhere,” he said.

“We should run over the edge of the lump at any minute. I dropped lost my GPS overboard last week, so it will take few minutes to find my blind.” It was a moonless morning, with no clue for navigation except stars and red lights flashing miles away atop a communications tower. The water was a black mirror, robbing the sky of everything, including shimmering reflections of star constellations.

The blind that Austin sought was a concrete box buried in the highest point of the lump. Leggett Lump is submerged during high tide, so even for an experienced captain such as Austin, with the waters of Pamlico Sound near Ocracoke Inlet constituting his backyard, the blind would have been impossible to find in the darkness except for its guardians — 200 floating diving duck and pintail decoys and five-dozen brant shell decoys tied to a floating framework of 1×4-inch treated lumber called a “wing.”

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