May 10-12, 2011 -- On Leech Lake (a recap)

I arrived in Bemidji on Tuesday, May 10, and the next evening I wrote a long blog entry about my first two days at Leech Lake. Unfortunately, Blogger.com, the web site that hosts my blog, had technical difficulties and all blogs written and posted from May 11 through May 13 (at around 11:3o a.m. CDT) were lost. I will not try to re-create my entire entry, instead I'll just bulletize the events of the past few days.

May 10:

• Arrived at Bemidji airport around 4:30 p.m. CDT and went to Corner Sports to pick up my boat, but they hadn't finished the service on it, so I was told to come back on Wednesday, May 11.


• Enjoyed a cold beer on John Newman's dock as we watched the sunset into the Western sky and had a nice conversation.


• The weather in the evening was still up over 60 degrees, skies were clear, and there was just a slight breeze out of the SE.

May 11:

• Picked up my boat at Corner Sports, complete with two new deep-cell batteries for the trolling motor, and a new cranking battery for the main motor.


• Came home, got ready to launch boat, but the electric motor on the boat lift went out, and that subsequently caused the lift chain to break. Shore Brothers scheduled to come out on May 12 to fix the lift motor.


• Weather was in the high 60s, mostly sunny, winds out of the north at 10-13 mph.


• Went fishing with John in his boat at the Birches, and we caught a number of decent sized perch, and I caught jumbo which we kept and added to John's basket.

May 12:

• Weather was much cooler with a high of 44 degrees. Mostly cloudy, grey skies, with the wind out of the north at 10-15 mph.


• Got the lake pump working so we can use the various faucets around the property to pull lake water.


• Shore Brothers replaced the electric boat lift motor and fixed the chain. The lift seems to work fine. I'll launch the boat tomorrow.


• The Sharks beat the Red Wings 3-2 in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals ending a thrilling series and will send the Shark north to Vancouver to take on the Canucks in the Conference Finals.

I'll do a full post on May 13 of the days events.