An Outdoorsman‛s Journal
The Storm
Hello friends, This week I am writing to you about a weather event I experienced with two longtime friends, Jeff Moll and Doug Cibulka, while camping and ice fishing 2.8 miles from shore on Lake Superior near Ashland.
Every week before I go on my weekly trip, I watch the weather for the area I am heading to and adjust to what I see. The weather event we experienced was not forecasted. Saturday, March 11 — High 32, low 22 Yesterday we arrived and my golden retrievers Ruby and Red were along. As usual, we stayed in pop-up Eskimo shacks, we slept in cots and one of the lifesavers of this trip was that we were all wearing rubber knee boots. We have one shack for sleeping and cooking, another for fishing and socializing, and we traveled by using two snowmobiles.
Early this morning I turned on our radio and the weather report was that starting at 3 p.m. a storm would begin that would drop 6 to 10 inches of snow and the winds would be from 25 to 35 miles per hour. I noticed that by noon, all the other fishermen left the ice. I thought about how the wind would be out of the northeast, which meant blowing from open water, meaning lake effect snow. At 3 o’clock the storm began, and it was forecast to last for 36 hours. It started with a vengeance that immediately caused massive snow drifts on the top end of our camp, which sunk the ice due to the holes we had drilled for fishing and the snow weight. A constant job was shoveling out our tip-ups, as they would be covered with 3 feet of snow in a matter of 30 minutes. By dark we made an agreement and we did not want to do it — no one leaves the shack. Visibility was near zero and the chance of finding a lost person was about the same odds.
Sunday, March 12 — High 27, low 22 The wind is almost unreal; it bumped up to a constant 30 to 40 miles per hour. During the day today, each of us tries maintaining our tip-ups and it is physically exhausting due to the shoveling and trying to walk in knee- to butt-deep snow. Our camp/shacks have 8 inches of water on top of the ice. The dogs have to stay on top of the cots because if they get off, they get our beds wet when they get back on them.
We are jigging for perch and smelt and catching them. When we go outside the shack, we are soaked to the bone within a minute, due to the driving snow reaching every part of your body.
The half-acre around our camp is just shy of knee deep in slush, so walking is now hitting a physical experience that is testing each one of us.
The storm was forecast to hit its peak at 3 p.m., 24 hours after it started. The wind was blowing so hard that within 30 minutes of shoveling out our shack door, the snow was 3 feet deep. Monday, March 13 — High 36, low 24 The storm quit late in the night. Today we would attempt to break camp and go home. Both of our snow machines were nonfunctional, as they were 100-percent full of snow in literally every place. Jeff Moll was the mechanic, Doug Cibulka was the camp breaker and I hauled all the gear to a staging area 40 yards from camp. This had to be done because the snow machines would literally sink in the slush.
All three of us were literally done in, not a one of us complained and knew we were going through a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Each of us performed our task and three round trips later, we were loading trucks and heading home.
We caught three splake on tip-ups while breaking camp.
Sunset
