Hey guys I bought a Mallard Machine this year and I have been using my boat battery to power it, but I have a question. Is there another battery out there that I can use to power this thing for a normal 4 hour hunt? I don't run it constantly, but I do keep the water moving. I have thought about getting 2 of the batteries that you put in deer feaders and wiring those togather to give me 12 volts I need. Have any of y'all found a smaller battery that will work?

Would be good in illinois, but texas??

So far I'm having good luck with it. Instead of have 2 jerk strings going I have this one thing and no movement coming from the blind for birds to see. So I would call it a winner thus far.

Yes, its a winner, but si far the pond we have been hunting was with a mallard bubbler, in the dark way easier to set up.

See I haven't had a single problem with the set up. I have seen reviews where that was the main complaint, but I find it just as easy as setting up a jerk string. I can see however where the pain would be in setting one up, but I have everything set up on the boat right beside me so when I go to set it up all I have to do is just pick it up out of the boat.

I have 4 magnetic quivers that I use rechargeable AA batteries on and they have increased my duck sightings tremendously. Best part is that when I am done hunting, my dog will retrieve them for me!

I have a couple that I run, but not the biggest fans of those. They never move enough water to my liking.

I had a decoy with a small water pump in it last year and it seems that too much motion kept them from coming in. It is a balancing act for sure. A proper jerk cord is probably the best.......but darn it is a pain to deal with.

Good luck with your setup, hope you have a good season.

Is there I trick to using the jerk cord in thick grassy water?

Honestly I haven't found a good trick yet, but I think if you would use something with a smaller keel (not necessarily a smaller decoy) then it might be able to move a little better. Or you can take some extra time and walk the line that you're using for your jerk sting and move all the grass as you go. I'm also assuming that you're hunting in hydrilla grass. I hunt a couple lakes where I'm hunting very thick area of that stuff and that always seems to help me.

I like to have my cord under water so ducks can't see it. I anchor it down in several spots with slides. I had a nice rig hooked up on a pond a few years ago and it rained and buried my setup. It was easy just to go out and hook up several decoys to the clips and the cord was already run to my blind.

I now hunt a lot of deeper ponds and you can't set them up so easy in deep water (or at least how I do it).

Just a pain in the buns all together.

Pitt it almost sounds like you're talking about what my dad called a pig line set up. He still to this day swears that is the best way to have decoys set up. He use to hunt a deep pond and at the beginning of every year they would set up 4 different lines with bricks as weights ( one at the end the other near their blind). They would have eye bolts in them so they could run the line in them. They would run each line to the blind where each man would be in charge of a line and would pull on his line to keep the water moving. They pretty much had 4 huge jerk strings. He would always leave one decoy on each line so the next time they came to hunt the could just row out in the boat and hook decoys to the line again.

I like those. If there is no wind and water is glass, they work great. If there is any wind and ripples in the water, the I do not mess with it.

There is a battery store, a chain of them actually, called battery plus or something. You will find what you need. I bought a 12v battery for 55 bucks for a project that fell through. So I used it in a deer feeder. It lasted all season without a second charge.