By noon, Bill Crim had made his way down a 10-foot ladder set on the steep bank and was wading the shallows out as far as the depth of his rubber boots would allow him.
Every few minutes he would pull his chilled, purplish right arm from the Choptank River and throw an oyster or two or three to the top of the bank, where his father, Gene, was seated on an empty wire spool, shucking knife in hand.
"Keep 'em coming, son," Gene said, chuckling and winking. "You're doing a heck of a job down there. Just keep 'em coming, and we'll try to save at least a few for you."
The Crims were in lower Talbot County to hunt geese and ducks on lands leased by outfitter Bo Kennedy, who runs Fly By Island Inc. in nearby Trappe.
But aside from a single mallard taken early in the morning along a small creek inside Howell Point and some inconsistent sea duck hunting from a blind atop the bluff bank, to that point the oysters were the highlight of the low day -- well chilled, plump and slightly salty.
The moon was two days full, the daytime temperatures above normal and the ducks and geese already had been "on the moon" for about five days. At the convenience store in Trappe an hour or so before dawn, Kennedy had been apologetic, knowing that waterfowl hunting probably would be poor last Tuesday.
"I don't have any parties going out today because of the moon," Kennedy said. "Whenever people call to book on days like this I tell 'em there should be better days to hunt, and most of the time they listen, unless they can't book any other time."
The Crims -- Bill getting away for a day from his duties as a police officer in Baltimore's Western District and Gene driving over from Delaware to enjoy another day of retirement -- had not made the trip with great expectations.
"But when you get a chance to get out and hunt you have to take it, even when you know the birds are going to be squirrelly," said Bill Crim.
The birds had indeed been uncooperative, with flight after flight of Canada geese passing overhead of the creekside blind, turning deaf ears to Crim's best efforts and passing on to rest on the Choptank.
"On days like these, bluebird days when there is no wind and the temperatures are more like October than late December," Kennedy said at mid-morning, "the birds can sit out on the river all day.
"You throw in the bright moon and they can feed up in the fields all night. And don't you think that those birds, which have been hunted all the way down from Quebec, don't know a good thing when they can find it."
Kennedy figures that the full moon takes about 10 hunting days out of every month, unless there is wind and rain, snow and ice or heavy cloud cover.
"When there were 90-day seasons, you knew that there might be as many as 30 days when the birds would be on the moon," Kennedy said. "But in most years there was enough cold or bad weather to offset a good number of them and you could work your parties into the schedule with a few phone calls, get the hunters in on short notice."
But with the short -- and so far warm -- season this year and the one-bird limit through Dec. 30, the full-moon period has cut back business, Kennedy said.
"But that first week and weekend in January will be the time to go out," Kennedy said. "The weather should be colder -- and maybe there will be some ice around by then -- the two-bird limit will be in and the moon shouldn't be a factor."
Late in the morning, Kennedy slipped out of the creekside blind and set a small spread of sea duck decoys on the edge of the Choptank inside Howell Point, and then along with the family Crim there was some challenging shooting from atop the bank.
And all the while, congregated at the tip of Howell Point, rafts of Canada geese rested, lazing away the bluebird day on which hunters could not reach them.
"Frustrating, I know," Gene Crim said at midday. "All those geese just sitting there and no way for us to get at them and no reason for them to come in off the river to us -- at least not yet."
But by early afternoon the breeze was building slowly from the southwest and the rafts of geese were slowly moving back around Howell Point toward the creekside blind.
And the Crims were making plans for the evening hunt.
"Who knows," Gene Crim said while tossing oyster shells back into the river, "Maybe that wind will build up more, some low clouds will roll in and those geese will come low and fast right over that blind in the last 10 minutes of light.
"And if they don't, then you just have to be satisfied with a long day in the field -- which in anybody's book should be better than a day on the job."