A Fish Tale
by Denise Janus
Today we got on the water and started paddling at about 9:30 a.m. We had wanted to start at 6 a.m. but the water was too rough. We canoed to the Toledo Coast Guard in the Maumee River because we had to meet a gentleman, Howard Pinkley, who owns a flag store. He wanted to give us a flag that read "Don't give up the ship." While waiting for Mr. Pinkley, we had a nice chat with some very hospitable members of the Toledo Coast Guard and they were more than happy to let us get on one of their rescue boats for a picture!
At noon, after an hour at the Coast Guard, including watching a snake swimming in the water under our dock, we said goodbye to Mr. Pinkley and set off for Lake Erie. As we canoed up the Maumee to get to the Lake, it was about 12:30 when we saw two people on the shore fishing. As we got closer, one gentleman was yelling something to us and finally we made out that he was saying, "Can you pick up that fishing pole for me?! There's a fish on it!" We looked around and sure enough, there was his fishing pole. We canoed over to it and Dr. Vogt got a hold of it. With tension back on the line, the fish started to fight for freedom. I captured it all on video. Dr. Vogt held on to the pole as we headed for the seawall with fish in tow. The fisherman was so happy we were there to save the day! The fish we helped him catch was a two-foot catfish! We were so pumped up to be able to help the fisherman out that we had an extra boost of energy to make it to our takeout point about 12 miles down the shoreline.
We pulled out of the water at about 4:30 p.m. and made our way to the University of Toledo Lake Erie Center http://lakeerie.utoledo.edu/ where I'm typing from right now! We toured the building, gave our presentation at 7 p.m. to many enthusiastic people and at about 9 p.m. went to Tony Packo's for dinner. The University invited us to set up camp for two nights right out back! I'm so happy to camp here, because they have wonderful smelling flowers (snapdragons I think?) whose sent will lull us to sleep and be sweet to wake up to.