So… it was Spring 1979 and Lin and I had recently arrived in Minnesota from the UK, and enjoying the heady experiences of Living in America™. We’d been fortunate to be befriended by a US couple, Steve and Erica. Steve was part way through his doctorate on animal nutrition, and Erica was a business analyst working for the same company as me… we got on really well.
Steve was an ardent angler, and brought out these latent tendencies in me, even though I hadn’t fished in 20 years or more. So Steve and I fished the local lakes around Minneapolis, of which there are quite a few… it’s not for nothing that Minnesota license plates say ‘Land of 10,000 lakes’.
It was an angler’s paradise, fishing on these unspoilt lakes in the Spring sunshine with a packed lunch, a chest of cold beers, and with the largemouth bass, sunfish and bluegills providing good sport. We’d quite often hit the daily catch limits, before taking them home, filleting them and freezing them. And they made good eating with a beer and garlic batter!
Then in early May, Steve came up with the not-unreasonable-at-the-time idea of borrowing a boat, driving up to Lake Saganaga on the Canadian Boundary Waters (near the Minnesota-Ontario border), for the start of the Northern Pike and Walleye season. We’d pitch a tent, fish those pristine lakes and come back with a chest full of the best tasting freshwater fish around! So with his friend Larry, we set off from the suburbs of Minneapolis, with the idea of being on the water at midnight, when the season officially started.
It was a long drive of some 330 miles, most of which were pretty unremarkable… until we reached Duluth and picked-up the Highway 61 that Dylan wrote about (Dylan was from nearby Hibbing). It followed the north shore of Lake Superior (Hiawatha’s Lake Gitche Gumee) criss-crossed with rivers in full spate, coming off the Mesabi escarpment as the deep Minnesotan winter relaxed it’s grip on the land. Gooseberry River, Baptism River, Temperance River, Cascade River… all with peat-coloured water, and most with impressive falls and cascades. Spring comes late to these northern parts, and Lake Superior itself still had plenty of pack ice near the shores.
With Lake Superior’s many inlets and beaches, and things like Split Rock Lighthouse, there were many distractions and plenty of convenient stops for lunch, coffee and snacks.
We eventually reached the coastal town of Grand Marais, only a few miles from the Canadian border. Except at this point we left Highway 61, and turned north-west onto the wonderfully named Gunflint Trail. I note that this is now a paved highway, but in 1979 it wasn’t… it was a rough dirt road, and pulling a bass boat on a trailer meant we had to drive slowly and carefully. After a few miles, I got a real sense of leaving civilisation behind and driving into a wilderness. And sure enough, all the FM stations on the radio faded away one by one until there was nothing but static.
We bounced our way along the 50-odd miles of the Gunflint Trail before we reached Lake Saganaga and the boat launch, where we found to our dismay that the little inlet was iced-in. Anyway, we un-hitched the boat and trailer, and drove the mile or so to where we’d decided to camp. We pitched the tent, and dropped-off all the camping paraphernalia, and returned to the boat.
We decided that we didn’t want to be stuck in this small inlet away from the main lake, and we could see that the distant waters were clear of ice, so we launched the boat and motored to the edge of the ice. We found it was pack ice, already starting to break up, but it was still substantial ice, several inches thick and clearly just motoring into it wasn’t going to achieve anything, except damage the boat. So we evolved the technique of having Steve on the outboard motor, and the other two of us in the front of the boat breaking the ice with our boots and with the oars, until after an hour or so, we’d forged a way through to open water.
So we arrived on the main part of the lake and found a reasonable looking spot to fish; we dropped the anchor and started waiting for midnight. We watched as more and more fellow anglers drawn by the occasion, arrived in various boats, with various degrees of comfort – some of the more affluent anglers arrived by sea plane. But hey, Lake Saganaga is the biggest lake in the boundary waters… something like 14,000 acres, so there was plenty of room.
Of course with evening, the temperatures started to drop. We all had substantial clothing, thermal underwear, fleece-lined boots, etc., but of course, the cold still seeps in. By midnight, although fortified by flasks of hot soup, coffee, and brandy, we were bloody freezing. I confess that I started to feel a little negative about the whole venture, thinking of my wife in our apartment, sitting in a comfy chair in front of a nice log fire… but there was nothing to be done but endure it and hope that once the fishing started, we’d be distracted from the cold.
After what felt like an age, midnight arrived. Unfortunately, some of the more high-spirited (read intoxicated!) anglers around us took this as signal to celebrate by letting off fire-crackers, rocket flares and air-horns… so much for the fishing! But anyway, we all prepared our lines, baited with nice juicy leeches, cast… and waited. And waited. I don’t remember how long we fished for, but we didn’t catch anything. Not a bite, not even a tickle. Nothing. In the parlance of seasoned American anglers, we’d been skunked.
So frozen to the core, and let’s face it, we’d probably stopped having a good time about six hours previously, we decided to give up. We now had some logistical issues to resolve, and this needed cool heads. Well ours were cool to the point where all brain activity had ceased. Somehow we decided not to repeat the ice-breaking journey back to the boat launch (Plan A), instead we decided on Plan B which was to drop Larry off near where the pack-ice began, to make his way to the tent and put on some coffee; and Steve and I would make our way up a secondary channel that according to the map, should take us right to the tent.
We dropped Larry off, and Steve made sure he (Larry) had thunderflashes to discourage bears (bears? Nobody had mentioned bears to me!) Anyway, the plan was working up to the point where Steve and I turned into the channel, and discovered it was actually a fast flowing shallow river. As we’d lost one of the ice-breaking team, we felt Plan A was no longer an option, so we were committed to motoring up this channel. It was a moonless night and the darkness was like sensory deprivation, but we did have a decent flashlight. So with Steve on the outboard motor, I went into the bow and used the light to spot rocks and shallow water, and direct Steve accordingly; and we gingerly made our way up-stream. Occasionally, we’d have to back up and go round a cluster of rocks, but we persevered and somehow managed to stay in deep-enough water to navigate this stream. After what seemed forever, but was probably no more than 30 minutes, we eventually reached Larry who was watching our progress over the last few hundred yards.
There were high-fives all round after we got out and tied the boat up, but afterwards, and gratefully clutching a hot cup of coffee, I started to realise what we’d just done; if the propeller had clipped a rock it would have been destroyed. We’d have gone back down the river, with no manoeuvrability and at the mercy of the fast flowing current. It’s quite conceivable the boat would have hit something, been holed, or turned over, and even though we had life-jackets, I’m not sure how long we’d have survived in the freezing water.
It was a sobering reminder of how quickly dangerous situations can develop, especially when you’re miles from help.
Fortunately I didn’t have much time to ponder this… lying in our flimsy canvas tent, now I knew about the bears, I was sufficiently distracted by thoughts of being dragged off in the night for a good mauling!
