The Old Lund on Dad’s Reef

The weigh-in

Our club does the weigh-in at the public landing, with a scale on a folding table at the end of the main dock and a sound system Bud’s grandson hooks up to a car battery.

People come from all over the lake to watch.

By two o’clock there must have been two hundred people standing along the dock and on the grass above the landing.

Wives, kids, grandkids, folks from the cabins, the man from the marine shop. Half the town.

Each boat brings its fish up in a water-filled weigh bag.

Bud reads the weight into the microphone, a volunteer writes it on a big whiteboard, and the fish go straight into a release tank and back in the lake.

They weigh in reverse order of the boat numbers, so I’d be close to the front.

I stood in the line with my weigh bag dripping on my boots and my hands still cold, and I heard people talking behind me.

“That’s Roy’s girl.” “In that little thing?” “That’s Oscar’s old Lund, I’d know it anywhere.” “She ran that alone in this wind?”

I didn’t turn around. I kept my eyes on the scale and on Bud, who was reading weights in his slow, steady voice, the same voice I’d heard every spring of my life.

Boat forty-one had nine pounds. Boat forty had eleven.

Boat thirty-nine had a little over twelve, and the crowd clapped for them, two brothers from Bovey who’d been fishing the club for years.

Then Bud said, “Boat thirty-eight,” and the dock went quiet in a way I had never heard it go quiet before.

What Bud said

I set my bag on the scale. Bud lifted the fish out one at a time to show the crowd, the way he does for every team.

The first three got polite clapping. When he lifted the last one, the big one, somebody whistled.

He set her back in the bag. He watched the numbers settle. Then he leaned into the microphone.

“Sixteen pounds, twelve ounces,” he said.

For a second nobody made a sound. It was the biggest bag of the day so far, by more than four pounds.

Then the crowd let go all at once, and the noise rolled up the hill and back.

Bud didn’t call the next boat. He stood there with the microphone in his hand and waited for it to die down.

Then he looked past me, out over the crowd, until he found my uncle standing at the back by the pavilion.

“I’ve been reading these weights for thirty-one years,” Bud said.

“Roy Nyberg weighed in on this dock for twenty-five of them. Most of those years, this girl carried his bag up here, because he said she earned it, and she did.”

He paused. The whole dock was quiet again.

“Roy fished that north reef eighteen years in his good boat, and before that his dad fished this lake in this little Lund,” Bud said.

“Today his daughter ran it alone, in a wind that sent half of you home early. I’d say Roy taught her right.”

He handed me the bag. “Go put your fish back, Kari,” he said, off the microphone. “Your dad would’ve been insufferable today.”

The standings

The rest of the boats came up one after another for the next hour. I stayed on the dock and watched.

A team from Cohasset beat me with a little over eighteen pounds. A father and son from Deer River came in at seventeen and change.

When the last bag came off the scale, the whiteboard read: third place, boat thirty-eight, Kari Nyberg, one-person team, sixteen pounds twelve ounces. Third out of forty-one boats.

Dwayne had weighed in with ten pounds and four ounces, in the middle of the pack.

He’d taken his bag up to the scale without a word and walked straight back to his truck. I saw him sitting on his tailgate after, alone.

Third place paid four hundred dollars. Bud handed it to me in an envelope with a handshake, and the crowd clapped again, and a little girl in pigtails ran up and asked if she could see the boat.

I let her climb in and sit on the bench and hold the tiller. Her grandfather took her picture.

She asked me if it was scary out there by myself, and I told her the truth: a little bit, and that was all right.