The Original Plan (And How It Changed)
My buddy Travis and I bought a 1989 14-foot Jon boat for $400 off Facebook Marketplace. The plan was simple: turn it into a duck hunting layout boat with a grass blind we’d build ourselves. We figured $200 in materials, a weekend of work, and we’d have a floating duck assassin. What we ended up with was a surprisingly effective fishing platform that just happened to catch more ducks than fish—eventually.
The boat came with a 9.9 horsepower Mercury that ran about half the time and a trailer that looked like it was held together with rust and good intentions. We didn’t care. For $400, we had access to water we couldn’t reach on foot, and that was the whole point.
Building the Blind
We started with a frame made from electrical conduit—the same stuff you use for running wire through walls. At $3 per ten-foot section, we bought eight pieces and bent them into hoops using a cheap conduit bender from Harbor Freight. The hoops slid into brackets we made from angle iron and bolted to the gunwales. Total frame cost: about $35.
For the covering, we bought camo burlap from an army surplus store and raffia grass from a craft supply warehouse. The burlap formed the base layer, zip-tied to the conduit frame, and we wove the raffia through in random patterns to break up the outline. We added natural vegetation from the marsh—cattails, phragmites, and dried willow branches—secured with bungee cords so we could swap them out when they wilted. Covering cost: $65 including the bungees.
The final touch was a fold-down section at the front for shooting, hinged with old door hinges we found in Travis’s garage. We painted the exposed aluminum with flat brown Rustoleum and added some stick-on bark pattern camo to the bench seats. Total project cost: $187, under budget.
The First Season
That first duck season, we killed our limits more often than not. The blind was low-profile enough to hide in open water, and the natural vegetation made us disappear into the shoreline when we tucked against the bank. Mallards, teal, gadwall—they decoyed right into our spread. But here’s the thing nobody tells you about layout hunting: you spend a lot of time sitting very still in a boat that’s essentially a floating lawn chair.
During those long waits, we started fishing. Just drop a jig over the side, bounce it off the bottom, see what happens. Turns out, crappie really like the shade created by a grass-covered boat sitting in 10 feet of water. We caught more slabs that duck season than we had all summer fishing the same lake from exposed boats.
The Evolution
Now, three years later, that Jon boat serves double duty year-round. During waterfowl season, it’s a duck blind. The rest of the year, we strip off the heavy vegetation but leave the conduit frame, which works surprisingly well as shade. We’ve added rod holders to the frame, a small trolling motor on the bow, and a fish finder that cost more than the boat.
The 9.9 Mercury finally gave up last spring, and we replaced it with a 15-horse Yamaha that actually starts on the first pull. But the blind frame? That original $200 investment is still going strong.
What We Learned
If you’re thinking about building a boat blind, here’s my advice: keep it simple, use materials you can replace easily, and don’t get too precious about the design. Our first version had problems—the frame was too high, the burlap sagged when wet, the bungees popped off in cold weather—but we fixed them as we went. A boat blind is a work in progress, not a finished product.
And if you accidentally discover that your duck blind is also a crappie magnet? That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.
