Founders Tour 2017 Day One

Founders Tour 2017 started off like every other tour started.  Provisions of ammo, new gear, vittles, and, life blood.  We arrive at Bob's cabin and get our gear ready for the first epic day of the tour.    The weather is supposed to be extremely ducky, cold weather pushing snow from the north.  I'm informed that our first day out we are going to go out on kayaks to a real tasty spot on Kilarney Lake.  I'm a little skeptical, never having been on a kayak in the pitch dark of the morning.  Without daylight savings time in effect yet we wake up at a reasonable hour of 4:45 am.  Now Kilarney is not as far as Anderson Lake, maybe half the distance and since we are completely packed, we're in the water by 5:30.  Not having used a boat like that I jump in and start paddling while Bob is parking the truck.  Thinking I know where we are headed I point myself in the direction and I'm off.  5 minutes later Bob is calling for me to follow him apparently I'm headed in the wrong direction.  Upon catching up to him my headlamp goes dead, now it's up to me to follow him in the pitch dark.  After 30 minutes of paddling in the dark Bob seems turned around, reasonably so it's very hard to see anything out there, a smart person would have found a point in the sky or horizon and head for that.  Bob decides this is where we're going to hunt until the sun comes up some.

6:00 am now.  An hour and 4 minutes for the all powerful settle* time before the opening bell.  As we sit there we notice that trucks are dumping off air boats at "a" boat ramp.  Seeing that we paddled left from "our" boat ramp that there must be another boat ramp on the lake, which we know there is not.  Turned around we are.  When the sun breaks the morning sky we realize that we are directly across from the boat ramp that we pushed off from this morning, approximately 100 yards away.  Some how we paddled around for 30 minutes to be 100 yards from where we started.

Bob's next decision,  pick and head to where he wanted to be in the first place.  Pick up, reset, and, sit.  By actually moving it set the bar that much lower.  Nothing seen nothing shotten.  But what a day!

*Definition of settle.  The time Bob DaFolder likes to have before the opening bell to let things settle.  A point of contention with all members of the H7HT.