The Old Lund on Dad’s Reef

The reef at first light

I ran north with the sky going gray and then pink. The big boats had all gone ahead of me and spread out over the lake.

By the time I cleared the first point, I was alone on that end of the water.

The lake was flat calm. Mist lay on it in long, low sheets, the way it does on a cold May morning when the water is warmer than the air.

The pines stood dark along the shore, and the still water held every one of them upside down.

I wore Dad’s old gray knit hat over my braid, my navy fleece and the orange life vest buckled tight.

It was cold enough that my breath showed. I sat in the back of the Lund with one hand on the tiller.

Across the seat in front of me lay Dad’s old landing net.

Wooden handle, black rubber mesh, the hoop bent a little out of round from twenty years of fish. I had almost left it in the shed. I’m glad I didn’t.

When I was fourteen, Dad burned his initials into the handle with a soldering iron in the garage, R.N., so it wouldn’t walk off at the landing.

The letters had gone soft and dark from his hands.

I lined up the tall dead pine with the green cabin. I put the notch in the far ridge over the boat ramp.

Then I cut the motor and let the Lund slide the last few yards in silence.

I eased the anchor down on the inside edge of the reef and let it catch.

The boat swung around slow on the rope, and the mist moved past me, and for a minute I didn’t do anything at all.

“Okay, Dad,” I said, out loud, to nobody. “Here we go.”

The fish

I fished a quarter-ounce jig tipped with a shiner minnow, the way Dad taught me for cold water.

Drop it to the bottom, lift it an inch, let it sit. Slower than you think. Then slower than that.

The first walleye hit before the sun cleared the trees. It was a tap, then weight, and then the head shakes that feel like nothing else on earth.

Nineteen inches. I slid it into the cooler and watched the pump bubble over its back.

The second came twenty minutes later, a little bigger, just shy of twenty inches. The third took longer.

By eight o’clock I had three good fish swimming in the cooler, and my fingers were numb, and I was grinning so hard my face hurt.

Minnesota lets you keep four walleye a day, only one of them over twenty inches, so the tournament weighs four fish and no more.

A good bag on our lake in late May is four fish between three and four pounds. Mine were close to that.

Then, a little after eight, the jig stopped dead on the bottom. I thought I was snagged on the rock.

I lifted the rod tip, and the rock lifted back, slow and heavy, and started to swim away.

It took me five minutes to bring her up. I didn’t horse her.

I let the rod do the work and kept my thumb off the line, the way Dad drilled into me when I was a kid losing fish after fish.

When she finally came up alongside the boat, I saw her gold side turn in the clear water and her big white-tipped tail.

She was the biggest walleye I had ever hooked, and I had fished that reef for half my life.

I reached for the net. Dad’s net. I slid it under her and lifted, and she settled into the mesh, and I set her in the bottom of the boat and sat back on the bench and couldn’t see anything for a minute.

I measured her on the board. Twenty-eight inches, and thick. I put her in the cooler and held my hand on the lid and didn’t move.

There was nobody there to see it. Dad would have hollered loud enough to scare every fish off the reef.

He would have smacked me on the back so hard I’d have had a bruise for a week.

I sat there and held on to the wooden handle of his net with his initials under my thumb, and I cried, quiet, with the mist burning off the water around me and the loons calling somewhere down the shore.

Then I wiped my face on my fleece sleeve, rebaited, and went back to fishing. That is what he would have told me to do.