The storm

An Outdoorsman’s Journal

Hello friends, This week I am writing to you about a weather event that 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 that I am heading to and adjust to what I see. The weather event that we experienced was not forecasted.

Saturday, March 11 High 32, Low 22

Yesterday we arrived and my golden retrievers Ruby and Red are along. As usual, we are staying in pop-up Eskimo shacks, we sleep in cots and one of the life savers of this trip would be 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 from 6-10 inches of snow and the winds would be from 25-35 mph. Something that I noticed was that by noon all other fishermen left the ice. Something that I thought about was that the wind would be out of the northeast, which meant blowing from open water, meaning lake-effect snow.

At 3 p.m. 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 has been bumped up to a constant 30-40 mph. During the day today each of us tried maintaining our tip-ups and it was 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 and the dogs have to stay on top of the cots. 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. which was 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 are nonfunctional as they are 100 percent full of snow in literally every place. Jeff Moll would be the mechanic, Doug Cibulka would be the camp breaker and I would haul all 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, were loading trucks and heading home.

We caught 3 splake on tip-ups while breaking camp. Sunset