Inland Sea Kayakers: Mille Lacs Night Navigation July 2004

Mille Lacs Night Navigation July 2004

Just NNW of Isle
by Ron M.

Just scroll right down and you'll read a tale
Of a most instructive quest:
To navigate Mille Lacs at night
Without a GPS.
The skipper -- a skillful compass man,
With charts to choke a horse --
Covered all the basic stuff
In a three-hour course. A three-hour course.

After class we paddled out,
The sun still beating down,
With breezes stiff enough to build
Some waves to play around.
Rolls and rescues were the drill -
The same old stuff, and yet,
Much fun to follow Dana's rule
That everyone get wet. And everyone got wet.

The pot-luck feast was sumptuous
-- We're talking ISK --
And Dana's mesh-walled circus tent?
It kept SOME bugs away.
Then twilight came: We gathered gear,
And in our boats we tossed
Enough to ward off tragedy
In case we should get lost. (We really could get lost.)

The moon was gone, the ceiling low,
The mayfly hatch arose --
They coated eyes and plugged the ears
And wriggled up the nose.
Each compass, too, was covered up by light-drawn swarms of flies
They flocked to Rhett ... and Dana too ... The engineer ... and Renee,
The ecologist ... and the journalist,
Paddling out from Isle.

Beset by trailing clouds of bugs,
We squinted, thrashed and swore.
Our lightsticks helped them follow us
From shore to island shore.
But thanks to careful bearing sets
We piled up mile on mile,
Hit no big rocks and safely reached
Our launching point in style (it's NNW of Isle).

Back at camp, a serenade!
A street-dance band in town
Was cranking well past 1 a.m.
With heavy-metal sound.
We buttoned up, some fell asleep,
And slumbered on until
A honking thunderstorm rolled through --
We found our cockpits filled. We found our cockpits filled.

No dampening of spirits, though,
As the paddlers met the day.
We rose and shrugged and wrung out gear
And stowed it all away.
At Pat's some breakfast/ballast fare
Enlarged each paddler's smile
As we recalled the mayfly hatch
Just NNW of Isle.