By Scott Shephard
I don’t know what Lake Francis Case on the Missouri River normally looks like on December 9, but yesterday it was mirror smooth and busy with fishing boats from sun up to sundown, which occurs before 5 pm these days.
It happened so long ago that I don’t remember many details but Francis Case was the first Missouri River reservoir I sailed on. At the suggestion of a friend, we pulled our 19’ sailboat Ariel down from Watertown and rented a slip at the Marina. At the time I remember being impressed with the number of HUGE sailboats residing there but a local boater, who had stopped by our slip one morning to welcome us, said that he liked our boat and that the thing he noticed was that the bigger the boat, the less often it left the slip. He said that we should enjoy our 19 footer. And we did.
A year later another friend recommended Lake Oahe but that gigantic reservoir seemed very threatening to me. But I took the leap and never went anywhere else.
Yesterday, when Deb was busy with a Zoom meeting, I drove from our campsite down to the marina and walked through the shipyard where boats are on trailers or blocks for the winter. They towered above me and were awesome to see from well below their water lines. There must be at least 50 sailboats, some as large at 38’, bigger than most of the boats I’ve seen on Oahe.
Seeing these boats didn’t make me miss sailing - I’m thinking I did enough of it when I had Ariel and then later Wandering Star. Besides, three of the motives for trading a sailboat for a little camper were to involve Deb more in my getaways, to extend our range and to extend the “getaway” season.
And here we are - camping together (in 60 degree weather) on December 10, 2020 west of Yankton, SD. We leave for home later today and more typical cold, December weather will follow us.