| The Storm by Jim Hurt | |
|
So on this particular Saturday morning in early May,
he picked me up an hour before dawn, and we headed to St. Joe.
We launched the boat at a public launch facility in the river not too
far from the lake. If you have
ever headed out of the piers of a major river at the first light of day into
one of the great lakes, you’d know it is something you never tire of.
In a previous life, I think I must have been a sailor of some type.
I absolutely love the water and think daybreak is the best time of day
to be on it. I would usually make
a comment like that as we headed out of the piers, and Fred would say, "Yes, it’s beautiful. Now hand me the coffee."
Fred is not a morning person until he has had his second cup of coffee,
but you can tell by looking at him that he loves it, too. He gave me a kind of sideways wink like he does some times
and gunned the throttle just a bit. We
were anxious to start fishing.
This
morning on Lake Michigan was one of those unusually calm, rosy dawn mornings
that a fisherman lives for. Although
when I see red skies in the morning, I always remember the sailor’s creed,
“Red at night, sailors delight, red in the morning, sailors take warning.”
“Jim, this really and truly is a beautiful morning.” Fred said. “That red sky might mean something, though!”
“I
know.”
There
were quite a few boats out, but it was not terribly crowed.
Because our boat was somewhat small for Lake Michigan, we always fished
within a mile or so from shore. A
storm can blow up at any time on the Great Lakes, and if you don't have a
twenty five-foot boat, you should not venture too far from the pier heads, and
even then, unless you have a huge ship, you need to watch the weather and be
real careful. We knew that and
thought we were being careful, so we
put the planner boards out just as soon as we cleared the pier heads and found
a nice big opening between the other boats.
We
were of course immediately faced with one of those big decisions you really
agonize over! Do we troll north
or south from the pier heads? With
Fred and me, you know without question we will want to go in the opposite
direction. If he says north, I'll
say south, or vice versa. Somehow
we agreed on south—one of us must have given in.
Typically,
we would troll north or south from the piers for a mile or two and then turn
around and head back the other way and go past the piers just as far in the
other direction. If you caught
more than one fish in an area or saw a lot of fish on the graph, then you
would troll in a circle in that area for a while. We had four rods out, two on
each side of the boat, because that is all the Michigan law allows.
We could have fished three off each side and two straight off the back,
had the law permitted it. On
this particular morning, we caught a decent brown trout right off the bat a
hundred yards off the pier. These spring browns are so fat from the baitfish they are
literally shaped like a football! If
you don't believe me, ask other people who fish the Great Lakes for brown
trout. When we were about a
quarter of a mile from the pier, I had an idea.
"Hey, Fred, the fish may be packed in close to the river mouth
this morning. Maybe we should
troll back and forth across the mouth of the piers?"
"Yeah,
that sounds like a good idea. Besides,
do you see those cat paws forming on the water?"
Fred was very observant and usually picked up on slight changes in
weather conditions before most people did.
"Yeah,
the breeze is coming up pretty quick this morning!
I don't see any clouds but let’s make a big wide turn toward the
pier."
"Okay,
I'll turn us, and you watch that inside board and make sure we don't turn too
tight."
That
decision may have saved our lives that morning.
At least it saved us from having to run Fred's boat up on the beach.
We
trolled back past the mouth of the pier and again were no more than a quarter
of a mile past the pier when I noticed the wind was picking up even more. I could now see clouds on the horizon.
"Fred,
do you see those clouds?" I said in an ominous tone.
"Yes,
what do you think? I don't want
to be caught out here in a storm!" he exclaimed.
"Me neither. It’ll
probably be an hour or two before that gets here, but let’s stay right in
this area close to the pier where we can dart in quickly if we have to."
The
lake is over a hundred miles across, but the curvature of the earth only
allows you to see roughly twenty-one miles.
Many times I had seen clouds on the horizon that either took hours to
get to you on never got to you at all.
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