Written By: Hannah Riggs
The man, the myth, the legend: One Shot Payne. Most DuckSouth members know the infamous tale of One Shot Payne, but the story also has a different side unknown to most.
Our tale begins like many others, a bunch of young guys headed out to the duck hole early one morning. “We were hunting public land. And we were the guys everyone made fun of for getting out there at midnight. I don’t remember what time we woke up, but that particular day, for some reason, we were running late,” OSP said.
OSP and his buddies, who were 19 at the time, had loaded the trailer down with all their gear and were ready to go. “You know the little plastic boats that you might see full of water by a barn? Only his wasn’t full of water. It was a brand new boat my dad just bought. That’s what we were using, a little pond hopper. It didn’t weigh a lot, so it was perfect to use to float items into the duck hole. We threw our blind bag and decoy bag in the boat to weigh it down. We thought ‘That’s probably good. This trailer had sides and an eight-foot gate on the back. There’s no way this thing is coming out. And if it does, we will see it,” OSP said.
As OSP and his buddies made a pit stop on their way to the hole, things began to go south. “We stopped at a convince store to get Mountain Dew and coffee, and probably dip and cigarettes. That is when we noticed we didn’t have a paddle. We weren’t going to paddle with our hands so now we had to try to get to Vicksburg in time to get to Walmart and then to the duck hole,” OSP said.
Once the boys pulled into the Walmart parking lot, they realized they might be missing a key component for their hunting trip. “My buddy got out of the truck and was like ‘Uh!!!!!!, Did we load the boat up… on the trailer?’ I just kind of looked at him and was like ‘Man it’s too early for this. Come on, let’s just get the paddle and go’. And he said ‘No! Seriously man’. Then my other buddy gets out of the truck, and he just starts laughing and shaking his head,” OSP said.
To the boys’ dismay, their trailer was in fact now completely empty. Initially, they decided to go back and look for the missing boat and bags but traffic, on the interstate, was becoming hectic. So, they opted to go to another piece of land and still get their hunt in for the day and look later for their missing hunting equipment. As lady luck would have it, no boat, blind bags, or decoys were found.
Fast forward a few months later. OSP and his buddies were at school and on the internet. His friends were laughing it up as they read from a website. OSP decides to ask his buddies what they were looking at and what was so funny. It turns out they had found a new website called Ducksouth, so OSP decided to join.
“It was like a month later, and it was like a light bulb went off in my head. I was like hmmm you know, there’s a lot of duck hunters on there; maybe I should ask them about my boat. I had no idea what type of people were on this page, and I was young and dumb to assume if someone would help me, they would,” OSP said.
And then begins the OSP post we all know. However, what many people did not end up finding out, was that some people ended up offering to help OSP in the end. “I never found my boat, but I had a list of people who were offering to give me shells, blind bags, decoys and everything else like that,” OSP said.
One Ducksouth user went as far as actually being generous enough to give OSP some shells. “I received some shells from a guy named Novacaine. I don’t know your real name, but I appreciate it by the way! The funny thing is, I never met him face to face, my buddies did,” OSP said.
OSP’s buddies had a chance encounter with Novacaine one day while at a restaurant.
“My buddies were in the Delta at some dive, and apparently, he was just sitting there and had an open table, and that was the only place to sit. They get to talking and all of a sudden 15 minutes has passed, and it turns out they know each other on the internet. After all that, he went and grabbed two boxes of nice shells for my buddies to give to me,” OSP said.
So in the end, while sometimes guys might have a little fun on threads and poke fun at one another, at the end of the day they do have your back and will be there for you if needed. OSP, in particular, found this to be true.
“There are a lot of good guys out there. You hear stories out there like a kid in New York becoming a victim of cyber bullying. I don’t think Ducksouth will ever have that problem. You’ve got guys out there who are gonna be like ‘Look it’s a joke, it’s nothing serious’ and at the end of the day the are going to help out another hunter in need,” OSP said.
