I had prepared for everything. Notecards filled with lists littered the cupholders in my truck and my desk at school. It’s amazing how much stuff you can think to bring on a day and a half fishing trip for coho salmon in Lake Superior. Especially when that trip involves five friends who love to think of inconsequential competitions.
Tent. Check.
Cots for tent. Check.
Ziplock bags for salmon filets. Check.
Binoculars to spy on the other two boats in the six-man salmon tournament. Check.
Leaf blower to keep mosquitoes off the guys cleaning the fish. Check.
Bug hat, long pants, socks, long sleeved shirt and leather gloves to keep the bugs off the guy wearing the leaf blower to keep the bugs off the guys cleaning the fish. Check.
It was Friday afternoon, and I had already secured the most important item on the list. During my half-hour planning period, I had taken three giant tubs of papers from school to the recycling bins, conveniently located next to Jay’s Sporting Goods and Cops & Doughnuts, two of Gaylord’s most import businesses.
This year was a chance at redemption. Last year I had brought day-old doughnuts to the Lake Superior salmon fishing regalia. By the time we ate them, they were two and three-day old doughnuts, and they tasted like it. First note to self: Never tell your friends you brought them day-old doughnuts. They tend to remember such things, and they make sure you never forget it as well. This year the doughnuts would be freshly-baked on Friday morning.
When I got back to school and bumped into Chris Atteberry, a new teacher to our staff and something of a coho expert considering the fact that in the summer he guides on a spectacular and almost unknown fishery for self-sustaining coho salmon on Crystal Lake.
“Oh man! You’re going coho fishing? You have an orange flasher and a purple Howie fly?”
“Uhhh … no.”
“Oh dude, you’ve got to have that! That out fishes everything. Trust me. You’ll crush them with that combination.”
“Chris, I totally don’t believe that. Find the fish and put something by them. If they’re hungry, they’ll hit it.”
“I’m telling ya, it’s got to be orange and purple. Find an orange flasher and a Howie fly. You’ll thank me later.”
This was not the time to hear such news. We needed to get out of town and head north. I had already blown my extra 10 minutes of planning time on procuring doughnuts. I didn’t even know what a Howie fly was. Nor did I believe Chris. But the bullet was out of the gun, and there was no way to take it back now. Chris had introduced doubt, the kind that had fueled get-rich-quick schemes and snake-oil sales for years. What if he was right…?
I texted Todd pictures of orange flashers and Howie flies. He was on his way north and could swing by Jay’s in Clare. Todd triumphantly pulled into the driveway with $40 of new tackle in hand about the same time I discovered that the deer had triumphantly ripped through the cage of deer netting I had placed around Kristin’s hostas and ate half of them the night before. Not what you want to discover while loading the boat and heading out of town for a guy’s weekend. We quickly threw up a metal-fenced contraption around the surviving hostas that would have made the Beverly Hillbillies proud and pointed the truck north.
Ahhh … the frenetic rush to load and go over, we relaxed as we crossed the bridge, looking at sun-dappled whitecaps below. Life was good. Two hours later, the nose of the boat touched the beach on our campsite and Bret came out to greet us.
Hugs and handshakes. “Good to see you guys! Nice boat! Where’s your downriggers?”
I looked at the empty transom.
“Hanging on the wall of my workshop.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. So much for lists on notecards. But we were not entirely out of the game. Lake Superior cohos hit at a variety of depths. Bret and Dan had good luck in the past on both dipsy divers going down to about 50 feet and deep-diving stick baits run off planer boards that could hit the 20-foot mark. We still had our dipsies and our planer lines.
With money in the pot for first fish, biggest fish and most fish, we slept soundly, if you could call thinking of how to jury-rig a downrigger with what few resources I had in my truck and tackle box sleeping soundly. In a moment of MacGyver brilliance, I realized hanging a cannonball off the rear cleat of my boat on a length of paracord might actually work, providing I keep the paracord out of the engine’s propeller.
The sun shone brilliantly as Todd and I motored out into Lake Superior at around 6:30 a.m., measuring the paracord in 8-foot lengths to discover we only had 32 feet of it. At least we would have one “downrigger” albeit a shallow one. That’s when our phone pinged with a picture from Bret, a nice coho behind an orange flasher and some kind of fly (quite possibly purple) laying on the floor of his kayak between his brown Xtratuf boots. Second note to self: If you want to catch the first fish, it helps if you go out at 5:30 like everyone else. Poor Todd. By this point, he was wondering what sin against God he had committed to shackle him in my boat.
That’s when the sun went out. It was surreal. We left a calm, sunny beach a couple miles behind us and drove into a fog bank like no other I had experienced. Condensation dripped off our lines and visibility dropped to 50 yards. The wind increased making two to three-foot waves. Not enough to be dangerous but enough to keep you from looking down into your tacklebox for more than a few seconds at a time. With 43-degree water, I worried about Bret in his electric motor-propelled fishing kayak. Then, a dark apparition appeared out of the fog, bobbing up and down in the waves. What was the chance we’d bump into Bret with no radar and no mutual gps phone tracking in a Lake Superior fog bank? He assured us he was fine, and with two fish in the boat and one lost, he was keeping and eye on the weather, getting cold and fishing his way back in.
We should have joined him. Instead, we fished on, guided only by sonar depth and compass heading. An hour later, fishless, one of the dipsy rods screamed out line. Not only had we found Bret in the fog bank, we also found the single gill net in that area. Then the other dipsy followed the first. You don’t recover equipment from a gill net. You simply break it off. In a matter of minutes, we lost two dipsy divers, two snubbers, two orange Spin Doctors and two flies. Easily $50 worth of tackle. Gone.
By now, Bret was back in the cabin, warming himself by the fire, thinking, “Maybe Greg and Todd are like the Karate Kid. They’re off to a rough start, but little by little they start to figure it out. Catch a fish. Then maybe another, eventually overcoming their obstacles and rising to the top.”
That’s when our text came in. “We have now lost both dipsies and our Spin Doctor rigs to a gill net. Severely crippled but still fighting with a paracord downrigger ball, a surface Rapala and one walleye planer board. Be in soon.”
Tears of joy streamed down Bret’s face. “That might be the best text I’ve ever read in my life.”
It was the worst fishing experience of mine.
Epilogue: Dan, Randy and Ward caught cohos on downriggers, slider lines off the downriggers, dipsy divers and deep diving Bandits running off planer boards. None of their fish were caught on orange flashers and purple Howie flies. They were even graced by a Townsend’s warbler that first perched on their fully-operational downrigger and then on the seat next to Ward. Like Bret, they were highly successful and enjoyed the fresh donuts. I woke up with the stomach flu on Sunday morning, though everyone else said it was a hangover. I didn’t get out of bed for 24 hours. But as the sun shines on saints and sinners alike, in the group photo, Todd and I look highly successful.