For the past two weeks I’ve been walking Jack along the river in Riverside Park. Every day there are people fishing from the riverboat wharf. Although I never saw anyone catch a fish, just watching them cast their lines fueled an itch. I checked the 10-day forecast and saw only one warm day before a March snowstorm was expected to roll in. I called Dennis and Buzz to see if they wanted to go fishing one time before we got hit with another shot of winter. Both wanted to go.
The outing was planned for Tuesday, but Monday night Buzz called to tell me he was sick. Not an hour later Dennis emailed me to say that he’d had an accident while cutting firewood. He was okay, but would be incapacitated for the next week. Manyu needed to use our car on Tuesday, so I couldn’t go alone. The fishing trip was off.
Then on Tuesday the trip was back on as quickly as it had been canceled. Manyu, who thought she would need the car for most of the day, was already home when I returned from a late morning bike ride. I grabbed a quick sandwich, strapped a kayak to the roof of our car, and was backing out of my driveway by 1:30.
Because of strong winds, I decided to fish Brice Prairie Channel. The Channel is a narrow stretch of water that runs adjacent Lake Onalaska. The lake is actually a reservoir on the Mississippi River, and when the reservoir was created, the Army Corps of Engineers put in a string of barrier islands to protect the eastern shoreline from wave action. Brice Prairie Channel is the strait between the barrier islands and the mainland. The fishing there is not exceptional, but the islands provide shelter from the wind.
I launched my kayak at a canoe landing maintained by a local Boy Scout troop and paddled to my favorite fishing spot on the channel. The spot had changed. More accurately, the spot was gone. For as long as I’ve been fishing Brice Prairie Channel, there had been a small patch of open water between a pair of fallen trees. The configuration created ideal fish habitat. Now neither tree was there. They had been far too big to float away on their own, so one of the nearby landowners must have had them removed. The shoreline definitely looked less neglected with the dead trees taken out, but I’d lost my fishing hole.
I fished the spot anyway and did have little bit of action. The first outing of the year is always a test run, and there are usually bugs to work out. My first problem was that the 4 lb. test on my reel had frayed over the winter, and my line broke at the slightest tug. My second problem was that I put my cell phone in the river.
I’d overdressed, and after the first half hour, I needed to take off an outer layer. This easy task is not so easy in a kayak. I was able to wriggle my arms out of the sleeves of my windbreaker, but I couldn’t get it completely off. The jacket was long, and I was sitting on the bottom of it – and I could not lift my butt and pull up on the jacket at the same time. I decided to leave the jacket where it was, tucked between my torso and the backrest. Some of the material had bunched up in the small of my back, but not enough to make it uncomfortable.
Thirty minutes later I noticed that the jacket had shifted, and half of it was dragging in the river. I then remembered that I’d taken my phone with me, but wasn’t sure which pocket I’d put it in. It was, of course, in the pocket dangling over the side. I usually do not take my phone on the water, but I thought the trip might produce content for a blog and I wanted a photo to accompany the text. If I felt the need to bring my phone, I should have stored it in a ziplock bag, but that’s another one of those bugs that needed to be worked out.
When I got home, I googled “wet phones” and learned that iPhone 13s are water-resistant. If my phone is water-resistant in the same way that my lightweight hiking boots are water-resistant, I’ll be buying a new phone. When I tested my phone, it seemed to almost work. The screen lit up and the number pad worked, but the speakers were muffled.
I also googled “How often do people replace their phones?” All of the responses were either AI or Reddit, so I did’t trust any of them. One AI response read, “People typically upgrade their phones every 2 to 3 years, although some upgrade annually, while others wait until their phone stops working.” That useless piece of information, while perhaps accurate, confirms my low opinion of AI.
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