When you’re on a canoe fishing trip up in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota and several portages from home, a change in weather can really throw you for a loop. Grant Sega knows first hand. He’s now the Vice President at Spring Creek Manufacturing after his family purchased the company in July of 2017. But a few years before that he was a customer, and he’s glad he was. It was spring time, shortly after the walleye fishing opener, and the group of six men had their two canoes each fitted with Spring Creek’s center-seat rowing unit, which allows a center paddler the extra power of rowing with two 7-foot oars rather than a short canoe paddle.
“We were going for a day of fishing and we got across a couple portages to a couple big bodies of water that we were going to be fishing on.” Grant tells, “The weather was looking nice. We knew that there was going to be a possibility for some storming in the later afternoon but we figured we’d be back by the time it came in. We got to our fishing spot pretty early on in the morning.”
They found some great action in a small cove. “We ended up staying longer than we should have. The fishing was really good and so we were having a great time; a lot of catch and release… We had a lot of doubles and even triples at some points between the two boats… The fishing was just phenomenal.”
“We were there for a couple hours and decided it was time to start heading back; we saw some weather rolling in and a little bit of rain was coming down. Luckily we had packed some rain gear.” Grant was one of the younger guys on the trip, and so he was positioned in the center seat to best use his strength. “As we came out of this bay we got to more open water and realized that it was a lot windier than we had expected [since] we were shielded in that cove… We were about half way [across] before we realized that, ‘Oh boy,’ we had gotten in a little bit of a sticky situation. You can imagine three gown men in a two person canoe with a lot of gear can be weighed down quite substantially; and we had some good chop on the top of the water, to put it lightly. We were taking on some water and then believe it or not I lost one of my favorite fishing hats… Both my hands were in action there and it went flying off and I didn’t even have time to think about reaching back to grab it, and the next thing I know it was floating away. And with the waves and stuff the way they were, to even think about turning around was just not an option at all.”
His dad, Tom, was in the back of the canoe steering and helping strategize. “We were trying to ride the waves with them as much as we could but [also in] the direction we were supposed to go. We had to ride them sideways, so we were kinda doing a little bit of drifting one way to the other; we talked about, ‘If this happens we’re going here, if this happens we’re going here,’ and so we kind of had plans in place just in case it turned to a disaster.”
“We were about half way [across] before we realized that, ‘Oh boy,’ we had gotten in a little bit of a sticky situation.”
“I wasn’t necessarily worried for my life, but I was not looking forward to getting in that cold water if I had to… We had [only] packed lunch for the day, which we had eaten in the shore lunch, so I guess at the time I wasn’t worried for my life, but if it came to it and we were to capsize those boats and have to swim to shore it would have been – we were a ways away from where we were staying, so it would have been an interesting journey back, I would say, and a wet and a cold one at that.”
“Fortunately we were able to make it across back to the portage, and it was one of those ones that when you finally get to the portage you jump up out of the canoe and you’re kissing the ground because it was a worry. Because I’d never been in a situation where I was questioning whether I was going to have to swim to shore or not, or if we were going to have to light a fire to stay there.”
Grant is an outdoorsman and knows about preparation, but this canoe experience did make him a little extra careful afterwards, “Plan for the worst and hope for the best from now on, that’s for darn sure. You know, make sure we leave extra early now or double check – triple check – the weather to make sure that the timing is right. And maybe we don’t go as far the next time if the weather is not looking up.”