How many times has this happened to you? Your mind is stuck on a specific thought pattern and then “boom,” up pops a made-to-order complementary object that tops off your thought as neatly as a cherry tops off a sundae. That happened to me yesterday. I was thinking of fishing in Finland with a friend, and boom, the cherry appeared.

  I was clearing away outdated stuff from my office shelves, all the time reminiscing about that distant fishing adventure I’d had in Finland, and wondering whether the story was worthy of telling in a post. As my thoughts rolled on, I came across a stack of neglected CDs and DVDs. One of them had “For Ken” written on it.

  I had no idea what that DVD might contain, but I was curious, so I stuck it into my computer and up popped a movie on the screen, one beginning with me in a rowboat just launched. There it was: the perfect cherry atop my sundae, a documentation of the very adventure I had been thinking about!

  My friend, Martti, had recorded parts of that adventure with his home movie camera, something I’d forgotten, for this happened decades ago. He later transferred the resultant film to a DVD and shipped a copy across the ocean to me. I’d watched it at the time, and lost track of it until yesterday.

  A bit of background. We were at his summer cottage, the day after we had fired up his smoke sauna (see that story here). The movie records part of our boating adventure on Lake Suvasvesi (see here) as we went to check on the fishing nets we had set out the night before.

  I took a few screen shots of the action in the movie. Here’s the first, grainy as it is.

What you can’t tell from the above view is how foggy it was. We probably couldn’t see more than 100 feet in any direction. I remember thinking it would be a long shot to even find our nets in that murky mist on a lake covering 90 square miles. We had rowed for a considerable time on the preceding night to reach the site where Martti chose to set the nets.

  Because of the long time lapse since this occurred, details are fuzzy, but I still remember seeing nothing but water, waves, and fog as Martti rowed us steadily and rhythmically along the lake. After what seemed to be a long time, and with my doubts of success rising even higher, I happened to spot the floats marking the location of our fishing nets. They were bobbing just ahead, directly in our path. Martti had found our needle in the haystack.

  We pulled the nets aboard and discovered a nice number of small fish had entangled themselves in our web, fish that later would make a fine dinner. Martti asked if I’d like to row us back. Sure thing! So I grabbed the oars and rowed, with Martti navigating. I rowed, and rowed, and rowed some more, seeing nothing but water and fog, wondering if Martti could actually find the way back.

  Wind blew into action and complicated things. Waves kicked up. Our boat joined the fray, bouncing from stem to stern, rocking with the punch of a bucking bronc. I rowed on, my muscles beginning to complain, my enthusiasm waning. Pride kept me going. All this time Martti sat calmly in the stern, navigating us through the waves, occasionally filming me pulling on the oars.

  I kept rowing, my energy draining. I began to wonder if I might row until the end of my days. Just as my fuel gauge bumped against zero, Martti told me to look over my shoulder. I glanced around and saw an amazing sight. Right there, precisely in the direction we were headed, was his summer cottage rising above the shoreline. Never, I thought, had a scene been more welcome. How, I wondered, how he guided me so accurately?

  I asked him about that later. He modestly replied that he had factored in the wind, the direction of the nets from his summer cottage, the waves, and maybe another variable that I don’t recall, but to me it was a feat of pure magic.

Correction

  In my last post (See it here), I wrote of demonstrating my proficiency at spear fishing and claimed I had no training whatsoever. This was misleading. Having now digested the above mentioned video, I remember my spear fishing adventure in clearer detail. It went like this.

  One night Martti and I boated along the lake’s shoreline with me in the bow, the homemade spear in my hand, and Martti oaring us slowly and silently forward, following a track that kept us in water roughly three to six feet deep. A lantern suspended at my side cast its glow down through the clear water to the bottom, so fish below were easily seen. I had the simple task of spotting a fish and aiming my spear to snag it. It worked quite well. I think I hit more than I missed. In fact, my first attempt caught a nice-sized pike, one that, as I think Martti put it, had been pretty much filleted before I brought him aboard. He was a tasty rascal too.