Guide Life: RC Sutton
Jacob Morris for SPLIT REED
Have you ever taken someone you care about hunting with you? Whether it be a friend, a new acquaintance, or even your dad. It could be someone new to the sport or a veteran hunter that taught you a lot about hunting, established that burning desire in you, and helped make you into the person you are today? While talking to RC you could tell the love and respect, he has for his dad as he told me about his dads Saskatchewan hunt. “My dad got the chance to come up to Saskatchewan in November to hunt with me a couple of days. After coming up in August earlier that year and seeing his face at the sheer amount of birds in the area compared to August it was crazy. It got so cold that everything I found had frozen up and the birds had left, I didn’t think we were going to be able to hunt on my dad’s first day up here. When my right-hand man found this creek that hasn’t frozen up, it was absolutely loaded! We decided to hunt the field a few hundred yards away because the birds have been hitting the field first. By the time I got back to the blind from my truck 50 – 60 thousand birds had already gone into this creek and to see the look on my dad’s face before we even pulled the trigger, it made my whole year. It was cold and snowing pretty hard and this single mallard drake comes in, it was the first duck of the morning. I start tapping my dad to shoot it before the other guys get a chance, one guy pulls up to shoot and forgot to load his gun. My dad pulled up and shoot that duck, as the dog is bringing the bird back, I see the band in his mouth, that was my dad’s first-ever bird in Canada and for him to kill a banded mallard was priceless.”
RC Sutton grew up around the Richmond, VA area hunting the many tributaries and his family land around the Potomac. He was introduced very early in his life to waterfowl and deer hunting. Like many of us we get ate up with hunting different animals throughout the many stages of our lives, and for different reasons, we stop and start one purist to begin another. Some get burnt out and for others like RC, they are just seeking new challenges. That desire to continue to learn and be the best at what you do is what encompasses the guide life. “My dad and my family own some land down on the Rappahannock River. I just kind of got introduced to hunting at a young age and honestly, I didn’t really like duck hunting at first, I was a deer hunter. The older I got the more I got out of deer hunting and got into duck hunting because of the challenge of it, now I don’t care about deer hunting at all I just duck hunt!”
His dad laid the foundation of his addiction to hunting, but RC had to teach himself a lot about duck hunting and eventually returned the favor to his dad. “No offense to my dad but none of my family really hunted it was more of he would go every Saturday and I would tag along with him. We would deer hunt during the week in the afternoons and duck hunt every Saturday. You couldn’t duck hunt on Sundays in VA up until two or three years ago, we would go every Saturday no matter what the weather was. Eventually, I took over the role of controlling the hunt and had to convince him to believe me with weather patterns, not overhunting stuff, hunting ducks when they are there and not when they aren’t. It took about two to three years to prove it to him, but I think he finally listened.” RC mentioned this family marsh is his favorite spot to hunt, and he has hunted all of the waterfowl hotspots. It has a sentimental advantage full of hunting memories with his family that no other duck hunting spot can compete with.
RC graduated from Virginia Tech with a 2-year AG degree, he also dabbled in semiprofessional bass fishing. During this time is when he got his start in the guiding world by taking a couple of family friends that he knew his whole life out on his farm. “It kind of just developed from there my dad said ‘you look after everything and make sure everything is up and ready, you brush the blinds, and pay for everything, I think you should consider guiding even if it is a way to make some extra money’ I fished for Virginia Tech when I was up there traveling all over doing that It was just my way of life. I loved to fish, I loved to hunt, and I was like why not let’s try it!”
Like a lot of the east coast guides, RC got into it before they changed the bag limits. “The first year was amazing! I picked up a new farm and back then you could shoot 2 geese a day, you could shoot 4 mallards a day, and you could only shoot 1 black duck but That didn’t matter as much when you can kill 4 mallards. The diver hunting and sea duck hunting on that farm on the Potomac and Yeocomico rivers was good. I had that farm and a few other spots around that area as well.” You can have doubts when you start a new career, and sometimes all it takes are the right words to light a fire under you and to validate this is what you are supposed to do. RC had one of those moments that you can tell still lingers in his mind at the coming and going of each waterfowl season and will stick with him forever. “I took my first group out, and honestly the guy is still my best client and he is family now! I took him, his 2 boys, and 1 of their friends out, we killed a 4-man limit. I just set back watched and enjoyed the show. The words he said to me about how the hunt went, really sold me and made me want to do it more and more.”
The waterfowl industry is all about connections and through those connections you never know what doors could open. RC was looking to expand his guiding business from the east coast. After that first year of success RC wanted to go full speed into the guiding world, he met some guys and they headed for Arkansas to give it a go. “We went to Arkansas kind of on a limb just to try it to see how it works, it was a tough year everywhere, but we did pretty well. Through the clientele base we built up between Virginia and Arkansas an opportunity came to buy an outfitting business from some people we knew up in Canada, I ended up not buying that outfit. I had just gotten back from Canada and found out there was another guy that was interested in selling his outfitting business up there, so I sent my buddy to check it out to make sure it was worth it. Since I was not going to be able to fly back up the whole transaction took place over the phone. I bought it and honestly, it has exceeded every expectation I had ever had. I was expecting to have some good dark goose hunting and decent Snow goose hunting but, all three flyways for dark geese overlap where we are which was a great surprise. The speckle belly hunting is world-class, the snow goose hunting in certain areas is phenomenal, and the duck hunting is really good. The ducks are the hardest thing to find, the cranes, snows, and dark geese are everywhere!”
Like many people, RC Sutton had big plans for 2020 and he decided to guide full time but with COVID happening that kind of derailed his plan. This season he will be guiding full-time for Goose Reapers and he finishes his season out in the spring guiding turkey hunts in Oklahoma. He kept the same outfitting name that he started with back in VA, he owns and operates Chapel Creek Outfitters a premier outfitter with Split Reed, located in the duck paradise of Saskatchewan, CA.
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