Canoeing Adventures as Kids
By: Mitch At Chasing Hills
Tags: Adventure, Outdoors, Parenting

Image credit: Julien Lanoy on Unsplash

There is a small river in northern Wisconsin that I have canoed more times than I remember. This little river is perfect for canoes because it’s too small for bigger boats to fit on. It’s swift in some areas, wider and slower in others but not too rocky or technical. The mix is just right. Seeing other people on the river was pretty rare, which added to the allure of it.

The lack of boat traffic resulted in trees being down across the water, laying in our way to test our mettle and boat maneuvering skills as we paddled through. We believed this felt like a fair price to pay to have essentially our own private river.

There was one “go-to” trip we would regularly do. We’d talk one of my parents to drive us up so we could drop in at a bridge where a county highway crossed this little river and paddle back to my parents’ house 7–8 miles downstream. The smaller river converged with a larger one that was significantly busier, so the last couple miles we’d be on flat, but busy water. This made us appreciate the relative calm of the smaller river.

On each of these trips, fishing played a big role. We felt like we had this river all to ourselves. Mostly because we did. If we paddled relatively hard and fished little we made it around a two hour trip. But if it was one of those days where the fish were hitting or we wanted to explore some new spots or pitch lures under a newly downed tree, it could easily end up being a 4–6 hour trip on the water.

I was in high school when my family moved to the area and we quickly discovered this little route. Often we’d take this trip without any parental supervision and the freedom we enjoyed on the water was exhilarating.

We’d pack some lunch and sodas in a cooler and heed my dad’s advice of “you’ll lose anything not tied down” in the event of the boat flipping. So we always had a web of ropes tied into everything not attached to the boat.

Half the fun of this river was who was on the trip. Initially I went with my brothers and cousins and eventually showed a couple friends our mini-paradise.

One of the earliest and most memorable was when I went with a friend and a younger cousin of mine. My friend and I were several years older than my cousin and that day we were both hammering the smallmouth bass, affectionately called smalleys.

It was a matter of pride that my cousin wouldn’t take a rod with a fish already hooked if one of us attempted to hand it to him, and so it went that he caught very few, if any, fish for most of the trip.

In a shallow, rocky section of the river, we spotted an unsuspecting crayfish sitting on the bottom of the river and were able to catch it by pinning it to a rock with the end of a fishing rod. We were pretty proud of this uncommon catch and pretty quickly connected the dots to use it as bait — smalleys love crayfish.

We may have turned a blind eye to the DNR regulations of live bait on this particular river with two things in mind. First, we were very unlikely to see anyone else. And second, would a warden blame us for naively wanting an 11–12 year old kid to hook into a fish after he’d been skunked all day? We figured our odds were pretty good.

My cousin had a nice cast to put that crayfish into a deep pool across the river. Within a few seconds his line was slammed and the rod tip was bent almost to the water. His eyes went wide as he clung onto the fishing pole and after a few minutes of hooting and hollering after he landed the biggest smalley of the day, we tied it to our bow line so we could bring it back to the house and get some pictures before releasing it.

Later, one of the other most memorable trips I took on this river was with Sarah. We were dating at the time and had a blast spending a long afternoon together on the water. It was a good indicator of how much we both liked outdoor adventures and would be a foreshadowing to adventures we’d have through dating and eventually marriage.

A few years later my dad and I took our oldest son, who was 2–3 at the time on the trip. Each trip on this river was unique in its own way, but this one was a completely new dynamic for me: that of a parent.

I appreciated a lot of the small things I had previously taken for granted. The novelties my son enjoyed were peeing into the river and drinking juice boxes in the bottom of the canoe. He ended up falling asleep as my dad and I slayed what seemed like an endless string of nice sized smalleys in a particularly productive fishing hole.