Thanks, everyone, for the posts and opinions. We got in to Atlanta from Arkansas late last night ahead of the cold front.

I don't know how much detail about my trip you want, but basically it was a good first experience. We hunted in Brinkley, which is about 20 miles east of Stuttgart. We used pit blinds in flooded bean fields.

I guess because the year's hunting had been so spotty to date the people holding the leases around our pits had given up. There were no other shooters in earshot. We saw literally thousands of geese and ducks piling into adjacent holdings, but no one to flush them back up. As new birds came over our spreads and calling a robo-ducks couldn't compete with the pull of those thousands of sitting ducks.

In three shooting periods four of use killed 31 ducks, so that is about 4 ducks per person per day, which is not bad considering what we had come to expect. We worked hard for what we got, sitting in the pits for five or more hours at a time.

The good news is I enjoyed the experience, met a lot of friendly people, would go back again. The bad news is confusion over shotgun shells; having listened to all the recommendations on the board and having exhausted both Atlanta and Brinkley's shotshell sources, I shot my 3" Beretta auto with modified choke (this was correct, the decoyed birds were more like pass shooting birds, very few stopped to flair over the decoys); I first shot 1 3/8 ounce #2's; but, hit very few birds (I killed 1 clean, and simultaneously shot with two or three other people and several that fell, but don't know who killed them); the most experienced member of our squad, who had hunted there for years, used BB's; so, I bought a box of them, even though I thought they would not pattern as densely as I wanted at the longer ranges (remember, we are shooting ducks, not geese). I killed two more ducks cleanly with the BB's, but plain out missed a few and shared others, not knowing if I hit them or not. Most of the total ducks killed were by the guy shooting 3" number BB. But, again, he was the most experienced.

So, I'm still confused. To put it in perspective, I average 22 at skeet and 23 at trap, but on this hunt performed way below my lifetime expectations for myself. I think first I want to pattern this new barrel with the various loads and chokes on paper, then spend some time on the trap range.

Again, thank all of you for your input. Any final thoughts?