Being married to an obsessed fisherman, I occasionally get to spend a bit of time on the water attempting to catch fish. Because “everybody and their brother” goes to northern Michigan on July 4th, we decided to avoid the crowds and fish a couple of local fishing holes. Keep in mind that “local” is the Lansing area, where the glaciers yawned and left behind a bunch of slow moving rivers and mucked up lakes with warm water fishes.
Part of the fun in any adventure is the preparation, which, for us, included installing two roof racks on top of Mark’s VW diesel Jetta Wagon, which gets 43 miles to the gallon, thank you. I’d gotten the roof racks for Mark’s September birthday, and opening the box in July to peek inside at two bronze-colored cross bars and long, skinny piece of rubber was rather exciting, especially since I remembered ordering an all-black Yakima-type rack.
It took an hour to wrestle with the German engineered metal hardware required to secure the two racks, which was followed by a comical 20 minutes of sweating and cursing and dousing ourselves with soapy water as we pulled and shoved the long, skinny rubber piece that barely fits on the very top of each of the racks. That was followed by snapping the plastic end pieces in place and realizing that said end pieces were held on so slightly that they’d get ripped off in any wind over 20 miles per hour. We solved that with a few twists of black electrical tape. Then we were off get the canoe.
Now, this isn’t any ordinary canoe. It’s a custom-made 90-foot long square back canoe painted camou green. Okay, it’s only 17 feet long, and it was intended to be lightweight, which it is for Amazon women. For little `ole me the Freighter, as the model is called, is anything but light. See, Mark’s design started with Kevlar (which is really light weight) but he ordered it so was wide enough to hold 20 tons of duck decoys, added oar locks so he can row it, and reinforced the hull with concrete or some other such material so that it would withstand D-Day landings. The result: a canoe weighing over 72 pounds. My friend Roger has a racing canoe made of Kevlar that tops out at 33 pounds, which I can help lift over my head quite easily. For Mark’s Freighter, I had to start lifting weights. And taking Geritol.
We keep our jolly, green barge-canoe with a dozen other things that float, under our deck. Extracting it from under a deck surrounded by possessive bushes is difficult and followed by team grunting as we drag the beast up a slight hill and across land about 75 feet. After catching our breath and going through the motion of how we’ll lift the dinosaur-looking boat over our heads, we did it for real. All went well from my view from the bow, but when I turned around and saw Mark holding onto the stern and middle of the canoe, I noticed that the canoe was only sort of but not fully resting on the roof rack. The gunwales hung over the ends of the roof rack. The canoe was too wide for the racks.
Without discussion, we lifted the behemoth onto my Honda Element, whose two racks offer exactly 27 inches of spacing compared to the 38 inches we’d wrangled out of the now worthless racks on Mark’s car. On my car–which gets 20 mpg–the green floating device wobbles from bow to stern, so tying down the bow has to be done carefully in order not to yank the bow onto the hood of my car. Mark and his buddy, Denny, had used the canoe several times before, and I found tied to the bow this dried-cloth-like rope that felt like it was from the 1940s but which was long enough to reach the metal rings at the front of my car. I cinched the ends down, walked to the back and found two really nifty straps with hooks on the ends. I put the hooks on a metal hook at the back of the vehicle and heaved down the straps rather handily. Mark, meanwhile, was wrestling with two straps that were just long enough to make one pass over the middle of the bulging canoe. He found little humor in my commenting on the interesting grunting and groaning noises he was making and the cheerful glow of perspiration on his shiny forehead as he stood awkwardly inside my vehicle to secure the straps
With the boat bound and gagged, we went inside to cool off with some lemonade and to gather the rest of our equipment, which included mid-weight poles, bait casting reels, and several tackle boxes of lures for wrangling largemouth bass. As we headed off to Muskrat Lake, which Mark and I had both fished in past years, we commented on how the bow of the canoe seemed to be jerking back and forth and that perhaps some straps on the bow handle would be more secure than the cheesy piece of rope looped around this hook-like thing at the very bow. Because the green monster twisted back and forth atop my car, we drove perhaps 40 miles per hour the entire way to Muskrat Lake, only to find that the parking lots was empty and the formerly well maintained latrine door creaking and banging as it opened and closed in the increasing wind. This being a holiday weekend and the lot being empty was sure evidence that we should have found another place to fish. But we’re stubborn and determined people and flogged the water for a good couple of hours with nothing to show for our efforts except my two sun burned knees.
When we returned home, Mark set about gingerly untying the old bow rope as if he intended to keep it around a while longer. I shook my head, took out a knife and told him I’d buy him some more rope, that this one’s time had come. He pouted and stomped off to get two more green straps with hooks on them to replace the rope. A little more grunting later and the canoe was rock solid sturdy on my car.
In fact, the bow straps killed the green monster’s wiggle and the next day, we actually drove at top speed to fish the Lookingglass River. This is the clearest river in the area and a place I’d canoed many times but never fished. We expected pan fish and smallmouth bass to greet us, so loaded up our lightweight spin casting poles and smaller tackle. I also took my camera this time because I’d seen blue herons on every other trip I’d taken.
We paddled and rowed our way up the river and, sure enough, I got a decent shot of a blue heron. . .
. . . a shot of a painted turtle . . .
. . . a baby tree swallow in a tree . . .
. . . and my first ever ground hog swimming across a river.
I also photographed a monarch butterfly hanging around the boat launch.
If we’d called this a photographic expedition it would have been a success. As for fish: none.
Sunday came along and it was over 90 degrees and the humidity made me feel like a wet sponge. We’d planned on going to South Lake, a lake south of us and rumored to have fish in it that people even catch sometimes. But, we said, why ruin a good thing? We knew I could manhandle the big green behemoth that Mark adores, we had the strap system down, we knew what poles to take, what tackle boxes to grab, that the oars and paddles both work aptly well, that it’s possible for me to catch the anchor rope with a lure, and that groundhogs will swim across rivers to get to the other side. We debated fishing for exactly two minutes before walking inside to enjoy the pleasantness of our air conditioning.
That evening, after letting the giant green canoe stay atop my vehicle for all passers-by to admire, we removed all the straps, took the beast off the car like professional paddlers, and proudly carried it to the backyard. We lowered our durable green pal to the ground, flipped it upside down, and left it there until next weekend when we will return to local waters to try our hand at fishing again.
Or at least take some more photos.