ON LEECH LAKE – The plan before dawn Saturday morning was to minimize the chance misery would reduce us to sniveling cabin dwellers on the state's first day of fishing.
All day Friday the wind blew, howling still that night outside the windows of our cabins, which lay hard by the shores of this giant lake. Even the oldest and largest trees bent to the gale that gusted from the north-northwest, and at sunup Saturday the temperature was 27 degrees. All the clothes we could muster, that's what we wore.
Each day in May when the fishing season opens, about 20 of us gather somewhere in the state to impale minnows on jigs or drag sliding sinker rigs over and around underwater rock piles. On paper, the object is to catch walleyes. More than that, proving we're still up to the task is important, that and our Saturday night fish fry, a repast worthy of commoner and king alike.
So it was that most of our bunch arose Saturday nearer to 4 a.m. than 5, and shortly thereafter were watching exhausted gas rise in the cold dank netherworld that bridges night and day. John Weyrauch and Paul Kreutzfeldt, both of Stillwater, were on the dock of Big Rock Resort when I trudged toward them, each knowing, as I did, that a tempest awaited us just outside the resort's safe harbor.
"Good morning,'' I said, which, in turn, John and Paul repeated.
Now, quickly, we were in the thick of it. I was at the wheel, our craft pounding against foam-topped waves that rose and fell chaotically. Against the still-dark of early morning, our stern light burned bright white, while the forward beacon cast red to port and green to starboard. Into the maelstrom, the boat pitched and yawed, its lights appearing and disappearing as the craft crested steep waves before vanishing into cavernous troughs.
We took water over the bow, especially when we reached our fishing grounds and I turned abeam to the wind to cast a drift sock overboard. Appearing like a huge cloth funnel, the sock would slow our drift by providing drag to the boat, allowing us to present our jigs-and-shiners properly.
The wind whipsawed us, and to keep upright I knelt while retrieving or deploying the drift sock. Also, tying knots while the boat rocked required the hand and eye coordination of a surgeon. True believers, fools or both, we were convinced nonetheless we would catch fish.
