I would say that the right gear is important and goose hunting has a lot to do with debris mitigation. Keeping water out of your shotgun, ammo and the other gear you brought probably being the biggest one. I did have to buy another waterproof bag to carry my "kill kit" and food. Nothing fancy, just a 13L dry bag from Sea to Summit. By the end of the day, I knew it was a good purchase.
I'll go over some of the things things that worked well and where I may have overpacked. For now it looks like I'm close to the sweet spot considering the expected weather.
TSS...aaaah yes. The forever debate of cost vs lethality. I'll say that we shot more shells than I expected. Of the birds recovered, only three required a finishing shot. Most of the ones we hit were falling hard. Most notably, there was one that IGS shot that landed on a flat rock with the loudest of thumps. Several more landed in the wood, again there was just a loud THUD. We did recover some cripples that floated down the river to us as all efforts were made to recover every bird.
In truth, everyone knows the answer...we will never know if there would have been a difference if we had been using steel, bismith, Hevi-Shot...etc. What I do know is that at the heights we were shooting at, we had some incredible results. I would say it's a testament to the longer range capability of TSS vs other shells. I've shot high birds with other shot and it did not have near the results that we got yesterday. I'm still firmly in the TSS camp, and others are free to make their own choices.
