FELLSMERE -- The T.M. Goodwin Wildlife Management Area and adjacent Broadmoor Marsh in east-central Florida are among the state’s most bountiful duck hunting wetlands. But you couldn’t tell it by our party’s bag at a recent outing.

Murphy’s Law was working overtime on that cloudy day as Chuck Echenique, Dwight Aubert, Steve Jones, Doug Dort and Dort’s yellow Lab Jackson and I headed to our assigned location in the 2,400-acre Broadmoor unit well before dawn.

First, Dort’s pickup got stuck on a concrete barrier when he tried to park near the marsh. Then we had to break through tangled, waist-deep thickets of water hyacinth and cattail while pulling and paddling two pole boats, a kayak and a canoe. Echenique tore his waders on a sharp stick, and they began to fill with cold water. He pressed on, anyway.

When we finally made it into the open, Echenique was dismayed to find much higher water levels in the reservoir than he had encountered during early teal season in late September. Absent were floating mats of hydrilla and other vegetation that waterfowl like to eat; they were completely submerged. But he and his companions had to make the best of it.

The party split up into two groups as we paddled and poled around the marsh looking for suitable cover to set up blinds. It was well past daylight and large flights of blue-winged teal made shifting dot matrix patterns high overhead.

Echenique selected a stand of cattails ringed with hyacinth to conceal our canoe. Then he tossed out about a dozen floating decoys. Dort and Jackson set up just around the corner in their camouflage kayak. Jackson seemed very eager to plunge out into the water, but he had to wait for someone to shoot a duck first.

The huge overflights of teal continued — far too high to be in shotgun range. Intermittent gunfire blasted in the distance, but there was no way of knowing if those hunters had hit anything.

Finally, a flock of about half a dozen teal crossed directly in front of the blind. Echenique raised his shotgun and fired, splashing a blue-winged drake. Almost as soon as it hit the water, Jackson swam quickly after it and brought it to Dort.

Maybe a half-hour later, more teal sped in and Echenique bagged another drake, also efficiently retrieved by Jackson.

Dort hadn’t taken a shot.

The hunters watched as flocks of teal, along with mottled ducks and other birds, flew quickly by — mostly out of range. By late morning, the flights came less and less frequently, and then stopped altogether.

Aubert poled up to us in his pirogue with three blue-winged teal hens and said he was calling it a day.

“There’s nothing here for them to eat so there’s no reason for them to stop,” Aubert said.

Indeed, the only birds dabbling in the marsh around us were our decoys, plus a few coots. Echenique began picking up the decoys as we prepared to leave.

“The hunting could have been much better,” he said. “It was a mistake to go into the reservoir with the water so high. The ducks weren’t going to get to it; it is too deep.”

Like Dort, Jones never shot a duck.

Returning to shore, we again had to fight our way through the vegetation. Dort pulled his kayak up on the grass — and nearly stepped on a snake.

Aubert, who said he has hunted snakes since his New Orleans boyhood, picked it up behind its head and identified it as a nonvenomous banded water snake, then let it go.

Back at the check station, the attendants said about half the hunters at both Goodwin and Broadmoor had scored a limit of six ducks per person.

Hunters hoping to serve fresh duck at New Year’s Eve parties will get their chance Saturday. But unless they already have drawn a permit for Goodwin or Broadmoor, they’ll have to be at the check station at 4:30 a.m. and hope for no-shows. Or go to a butcher shop.