Yesterday Oct 4th I lost my fishing partner, best friend and dad in one soft, comfortable breath.
After 11 years with leukemia (the Dr’s told him he had two years to live at that time), he left for his extended fly fishing trip.
His passion was for fly fishing, mostly for sunnies and crappies. He always said when things got rough, he would think of hooking into a pound sunnie at Lake Ripley outside of Litchfield, MN. The excitement of the strike on the line, the tip of his 6 weight rod getting dipped into the water and finally the circles the big gill would make, pulling all the way, would make the tough time better.
Our inside joke was “Someone got a net?”. This joke came when I was getting ready behind the truck and he was fishing already. He hooked into a little 1/4 pound sunnie on Stahl’s Lake using his 4 weight. Someone (that I’m guessing hasn’t ever seen a fly rod in action) started hollering…”Someone Got A NET! He Needs a NET!”. I looked around the truck just in time to see Dad with his big smile lifting out this baby gill and showed this fella how big it was….maybe you needed to be there…Fly rods are similar to a buggy whips and it doesn’t take much to have them bend over.
When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I got my first fly rod from dad….minus the flies. My job was to practice casting in the yard with the line and leader only. I think he just wanted to make sure I didn’t hook him on the back cast! Since then we’ve used fly rods 98% of the time and he continued this practice on the Hutchinson area lake until this spring when his second heart attack made it impossable to stand for any period of time. The sunfish around Hutchinson rejoiced. As long as Dad had a fly rod in his hand…they were a threatened species.
For close to 35 years, he would make the trip up with Winni fishing the Third River Flowage in the spring and Cutfoot in the fall. Many of the Third River areas that are camp sites today where cleared years ago by dad and “the crew”.
We always had a standing bet…twenty five cents for the first keeper of anytype of fish each time we went out. I always kept a roll of quarters in my tackle box. If we would have bet on the first baracuda, it would have been a sure thing that dad would have got that quarter too.
In the last five years, with dad reaching 80…I felt that sleeping in the camper wasn’t working for him any longer. We started staying at Cutfoot Sioux Inn.
Last fall I talked him out of making the 4.5 hour drive up to Winni and start spending this time on the Croix and staying at our house. This was agreed on….until the last morning when we limited on eye’s and returned many outside of the slot. I new we would be back next year.
I always told him that we would go fishing as long as I could get him into the boat. Last spring he took me up on that. Using a wheel chair and with the aid of Mom and my wife, we loaded him into the boat. We all thought this would be his last time up there. Wrong again…
Dad spend 3 weeks in a nursing home this summer after a week in the hospital. He was just too much for Mom to handle. Next thing I knew, he was home again and doing amazingly better…so good, that I asked Mom if he could make it up to Winni… two days later we were fishing Cutfoot during the warmer, early September afternoons. He was walking to the boat and only needed help climbing in. I call this our “Bonus” trip.
Three weeks later, he knew that he was entering the hospital for the last time. With his type of leukemia, your bones start hurting and it’s imposable to get comfortable enough to sit still, much less sleep. Prior to leaving, he called me never mentioning that he wasn’t feeling good or planning on going in. When I answered the phone, there was the familiar greeting…”your cork’s down” as he always said. He wanted to know how my Red River cat trip went. He always gave me a hard time about fishing for those “bullheads”, but was always showing pictures of the flatheads to his friends.
Another saying that he started using 24 years ago with my daughter was “Do you love me, or do you not?…you told me once, but I forgot”
I’ll never forget Dad. 
