Heilberger Lake, Friberg Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota

We drove about a bit after having a fancy dinner at Burger King. We had decided to spend the weekend on the road exploring, so we toned our date nite down a bit. We drove over to Phelps Mill with the intention of paddling the Otter Tail, but there were too many people milling about getting ready for the festival. We ended up on Heilberger Lake and it worked out just fine.

We started to paddle to the north to avoid the sun, at one dock a lady asked us to look up the lake a bit a yell back if we saw her floating fish creel. We paddled up lake a couple of hundred yards and saw it, I told Laurie to grab it and I’d paddle us back to their dock. It had a couple of sunnies in it that the boys on the dock were looking forward to having back. There was also some sort of spaniel that followed up up lake a bit and tried to swim out to us. I stayed away as I didn’t want him swamping our canoe.

We got on with our trip, Laurie decided that she’d need some sort of visor for sunny days out on the water, it’s hard to always paddle away from the sun. We did hit a lady’s dock right in front of the lady, I think that neither of us was paying attention, I didn’t realize how close we were getting. We tried to stay in the shade and were mostly able to once we made it to the north end of the lake.

Heilberger is a small lake with a lot of inlets. It’s pretty nice to paddle because there aren’t a bunch of people on it, and you can’t see it all from any one place, there are lots of places that just “open up” as you come around the point.

We saw one loon and some other sort of female duck we couldn’t identify. And on the way back after sunset we saw a face coming close as we got closer to the public access. I thought it was that spaniel coming back to join us in our canoe, it turned out to be a lady swimming. It wasn’t too buggy and was an awful pretty place to watch the sun set.

Jewett Lake, Friberg Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota

We started to take a ride in the car in the evening just to get outside after a day in the house, summertime cabin fever, but we decided that since the nite was cool and clear and had a full moon that we’d try to go canoeing. We drove back home, loaded the canoe and set out for Jewett Lake.

We put the canoe in the water at around 10:00pm, it was pretty dark and the moon was nearly full, already quite high in the southeastern sky. The water was inky, and a little rough from the breeze. We paddled around the eastern side of the lake and crossed the middle. Laurie was kind of scared and kept wanting to head further up into the wind. Again, it felt like we were going really fast when we were headed into the wind, and it felt as though we were going really slow when we turned to go with the wind. It was an unremarkable time canoeing other than the beauty and quiet, broken only later by a small boat putting about. I clipped the yellow flashing lite to the stern cap, it must have worked ’cause nobody hit us.

Laurie appreciated the beauty of the water and the moon, but I think she was pretty scared. Later she talked about not liking going straight across the lake, that she kept thinking about sea monsters and such. She also said she worried that if we tipped over she’d get disoriented and unable to activate her PFD, then she said she thought that if she ended up in the water the snapping turtles would eat all of her toes. Obviously her imagination got away from her, but none of that happened, in fact she was surprised by the truck when we got back to it. We didn’t get home until midnite, and the bugs weren’t too bad when we loaded back up.

We are realizing that July and probably August are a bit too hot for daytime canoeing, we’ll lean on our evening trips, the only problem is that is when the bugs get going pretty strongly. Oh well, we’ll just use bug spray.

Elk Lake, Grant County, Minnesota

We met Karen’s (Laurie’s Sister) family and a friend of theirs in the evening after work at Elk Lake near Hoffman where they were camping. We took four trips around one end of the lake with two passengers each time. We saw a beaver lodge, and were able to recover a “splash ball” and a “noodle” from the bullrushes. There was a lot of activity on the lake in the area that we were at, so we had some practice going over wakes, Laurie said she was kind of scared but kept it hidden because of the passengers.

It was extremely buggy as we loaded back up, we left just a few minutes before ten and got home around eleven. It was a hot nite and we were glad to get showers and get to bed in a cool, dry house. Laurie didn’t wash her feet off before going to bed so we had a sandy bed to sleep in until Saturday morning.

Minnesota River/Lac Qui Parle Lake/Lac Qui Parle River, Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota

We had headed down to the Minesota River Valley to do some exploring and checked out Lac Qui Parle State Park. It was pretty hot and buggy, we explored the park and then decided to paddle a bit of the Minnesota River on the Lake. There were some rocks to the south of the public access that had a bunch of birds on them that Laurie wanted to look at, they were mostly pelicans, but the blue heron took off first, then some cormorants, then the pelicans waded in and paddled away. It was pretty rocky getting over there and there were a few of them barely submerged that we almost hit, we learned to watch out pretty closely.

We paddled a ways up one of the tributaries down near the bottom of the lake, the channels are pretty confused down there and it got pretty hot as soon as we were running with the wind and into the sun. We turned around and came back up, that was pretty tiring. I think that there was a small amount of current, but not really very much. Laurie didn’t paddle much as she was pretty tired by then, she kept hanging her feet into the water to cool off. It was a good but tiring trip.

The water in the lake/river seemed pretty dirty and I think that we enjoy cooler times of the day to canoe. Laurie mentioned that it scared her that the water was so murky, and there were quite a bit of big fish & turtle splashes close by as we paddled across some of the flatter areas.

We pulled the canoe out, then visited the first protestant mission in Minnesota on the opposite bank of Lac Qui Parle, and the site of Joseph Renville’s stockade. It remained pretty hot, especially in the mission church. We spent the nite in Montevideo MN, kind of a dumpy town, and were able to get Laurie a visor at the local Walmart.

Long Lake, Elizabeth & Friberg Townships, Otter Tail County, Minnesota

After a pretty stressful day and I wanted to spend time doing something different with my wife. We drove to Anderson Lake first, but then I decided to go to Long Lake. We launched to the side of the boat dock on the shoreline and it went much better. It was our first nite with the pad and backrest I got Laurie and I got myself a seat pad. I tried it out for a while without the pad, and then put it under me, it did help.

We started off paddling toward the sun, but Laurie wanted to go away from the sun so we headed east. We paddled up past houses and then into a reedy area on the northeast side of the lake. We saw a loon and slowly drifted toward him and were amazed at how long he could stay under. We did this for a time and then decided to paddle to the other side of the lake before heading back west, we’d be in better shade. We saw a couple more loons and were able to hear them too. It was pretty cool. We paddled through some weedy areas too, and the weed was kind of weird, it seemed sandy or almost abrasive, we could really feel it dragging on the canoe as we paddled through some of it.

I think I learned while launching that I need to put the front of the boat on the back of the truck. Also I think it’s easier for me to carry the canoe than for “us” to carry it. Laurie’s not too good at listening to instructions about what to do, she doesn’t seem to have a lot of “common sense” related to lifting and turning and things mechanical. Also when carrying on my shoulders I can see the bow and how I’m setting in on the rear crutch on the truck rack. Laurie can carry the loose stuff up to the canoe and I can handle the boat itself.

The seats worked well. I need to glue mine in place. I think Laurie liked hers, but nothing is ever quite “perfect” from her point of view. I think she’ll get used to it in the long run. She is stating to others how great canoeing is, how nice it is to see pretty things up close and how we can move slowly and quietly from place to place. I think she’d finally convinced that it was money well spent. She’s so conservative about things like canoes, and yet we must have nearly the same amount of money invested in decorations and clothes. I guess we just see it quite differently.