Sunday, August 26, 2007

Dead battery

I was able to get out on the lake a bit on Friday afternoon. Although I went to the same lake (Goose), I travelled a bit further down the lake. In doing so, I was trolling with a sucker minnow and was able to nail a small northern (20") which was cool. What wasn't cool was that as I trolled my way down the lake, my trolling motor (the only motor I have on the boat) started loosing its oomph. Realizing I hadn't re-charged the battery recently and it was going dead, I quickly turned around and started going back into the wind toward the landing. The trolling motor on a dying battery was no match for the wind and waves; the best the motor could do was hold its ground, but then started losing ground to the wind.

So, I started rowing the 16' Lund against the wind; I made continual progress but it was a long haul and I stopped a couple times, threw down the anchor and fished while recouping my strength. This story is eerily similar to an earlier blog entry; twice is enough to row across a lake in a given fishing season.

Ironically, although this is a story about the ramifications of a dead battery, the time I spent on the lake (and this entire story) was the process of recharging my personal batteries. If you've been reading my blog, you realize that fishing is the one thing I've found that recharges my battery. When I'm not able to recharge I end up with no power to drive into the wind and end up using my own strength to power through situations.

What charges your batteries? Trust me, the time and effort taken to charge our batteries is a small price to pay compared to the struggle and pain that come when the battery goes dead.

2 comments:

Larry Fredlund said...

Bro - Really now! Even I have a back-up (and charged) battery on my junker boat. A back-up battery, on-sale at Walmart, may just let you keep your personal battery charged up after fishing, not having to repeatedly row back to shore. A cheaper (ha ha) solution, might be for you to, from now on, only fish up-wind - directly up-wind, of the boat landing. Happy fishing... teasing you is all I need to recharges my batteries. (Mom - congrats on your B-tism....from your good son)

Dad said...

Did you know, we have a perfectly good 6 horse Johnson outboard sitting in the shed? All you need to do is ask ;-)