Mallard Bay

How do you grow a waterfowl outfitter without losing your family, your faith, or yourself in the process?

For years, Luke Bledsoe worked the oilfield Monday through Thursday and guided Friday through Sunday. Booking every hunt, chasing every deposit, answering every text himself, then driving back to the rig. Jillian calls it the years he broke his body to build what they have now.

Then she stepped in. Took over the bookings, the invoices, the follow-ups. And the first thing she did was stop running it on memory and a spreadsheet.
This clip is her on what changed after that.

The full conversation with Luke and Jillian Bledsoe of Speck Ops Waterfowl is live now on YouTube: leaving the oilfield, splitting a business as husband and wife while homeschooling their kids, keeping God at the center of it, and why they think the people in the blind matter more than anything on the marketing side.

Outfitter Growth Series, new episode. Link in bio.

“Take ‘em.”

Blind doors fly open. Everything after that is instinct.

This is why we do it.

🎥: Whiskey Sloughs

Feet down. Wings cupped. Fully committed.

This is the payoff. Everything before this moment was just setup.

Watch’em work.

🎥: Ryan Campbell

There’s nothing like the first group of the morning.

Some mornings you’re not chasing birds. You’re chasing this feeling.

What’s your favorite season of choice? Broken Plains Outfitting Company picked a whole year. 

Out of Fort Benton, Montana, they hunt the Missouri River Breaks hard: mule deer, waterfowl, upland birds, and Merriam’s turkey across some of the most iconic Big Sky ground there is. Ducks and geese hunted raw along the river, dogs working wild pheasant and sharptail across unpressured prairie, turkey through cottonwood bottoms and pine foothills.

Then the calendar flips and they don’t stop. Guided fly fishing across Montana, plus bowfishing trips in the Florida Panhandle and Upstate New York, all under the same outfit.

Four seasons, four states of terrain, one crew that knows how to run it all. Go give them a follow.

Broken Plains Outfitting Co.

Really lean into it.

Louisiana offshore fishing with a little extra firepower. Big tuna, blue water, and a full-auto lineup. This isn’t your average charter.

Southeast Kansas doesn’t do boring bag limits, and neither does Split Wing Outfitters.

Waterfowl is the bread and butter here: dry grain fields, cattle ponds, sheet water, sloughs and creeks, hunted daily until it’s right. Mallards, gadwall, pintail, wigeon, specklebellies, snows, Canadas. A true mixed bag, and clients get a real shot at their bird of choice.

But it doesn’t stop at ducks and geese. Split Wing also runs guided deer, turkey, and pheasant hunts, plus lodging on site, so the whole trip is handled from the moment you land in Kansas to the moment you leave.

That’s the kind of full operation that turns first time clients into repeat ones year after year. Go give them a follow.

Sᴘʟɪᴛ Wɪɴɢ Oᴜᴛꜰɪᴛᴛᴇʀꜱ

Two guides who’ve been chasing ducks in the same Arkansas timber since they were 14 years old. That’s Uptop Outdoors. 

Josh Wadkins and Warner Wright turned a lifetime of scouting Northeast Arkansas into a full guide operation, running ducks, specklebellies, and conservation snow goose hunts with lodging and meals built into every trip. Morning and afternoon hunts mean more time in the blind, not less.

They also offer self-guided hunts for the hunters who want to run their own setup: pre-scouted fields, pit blinds and layouts, and a full orientation before you head out on your own.

This is what it looks like when local knowledge turns into a real operation. Go give them a follow.

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