Rick Nemecek of Port Clinton, Ohio, is a lifelong duck hunter and longtime guide in the Sandusky Bay marshes on the south shore of Lake Erie. Nemecek's grandfather guided here in the early 1900s. Today, Nemecek guides at the Winous Point Shooting Club, the oldest actively chartered duck club in North America (1856). He also hunts on local public shooting areas. A freelance outdoor writer and magazine editor in real life, Nemecek abandons his desk when the waterfowl season opens and hunts every day.

The Sandusky Bay marshes are a maze of cattails, reeds, and open-water potholes that average 50 to 100 yards across. Before a hunt, Nemecek will scout to learn where puddle ducks are working, then set up in a promising spot. Sometimes he hunts from a fixed blind or a punt boat, but usually he huddles in natural cover as he attempts to toll birds in.

In so doing, Nemecek uses a small decoy spread, but one that is assembled through experience to draw birds. "I'll use 12 to 18 decoys in the early season, and I'll increase this number up to three dozen in the late season. Early-season ducks aren't as wary, and they fly low over the marsh. But later in the season, the ducks are smarter, and they fly higher, so I feel I need more decoys to attract their attention."

Nemecek believes high visibility is a key to success in decoying ducks in the marsh, and he has a trick for making his small spreads stand out. "I'm a big believer in using black or dark-colored decoys," he confides. "Decoys have become almost photolike in their paint schemes, but hens, especially, are colored the way they are so they'll blend into their surroundings. This doesn't help when you're trying to draw ducks from long distance. Instead, you want decoys that'll catch their eye. Black decoys have a much greater color contrast than natural-colored decoys."

Nemecek continues, "I've talked to biologists who fly aerial waterfowl surveys, and they've told me the first thing they notice when they see ducks on the water is their black profiles. So my early-season spread will include a third to one-half black duck decoys, and by the later season I'll increase this number up to three-quarters black ducks. Then the next thing the biologists tell me they see is white, so I always set two to three pintail drakes in my spread.