When Things Go Wrong
by William Llilly (continued from page 2)

I will tell you the truth....I started asking God to forgive me of all my sins. I knew we were going to die here in the lake! There was no way out of this situation!

We were in serious trouble!

The wind was blowing the canoe in towards shore but it wasn't going to be fast enough. I locked my elbow around the canoe's cross bar. My hands were no longer functioning.

When the wind put the canoe on shore ( 20 minutes later ) we looked up to see a sheer cliff wall. We were going to die! I couldn't open my hands. They were frozen in a closed position. I had quit shivering. I knew my body was shutting down.

My partner, John, grabbed me under the arms and yelled at me......WALK!! We crawled to a more suitable incline for getting out of the water. I knew I had beaten my knees and arms on the rocks but I couldn't feel the pain.

After crawling on shore we could both feel the wind blowing hard against us. We had to get out of the wind! We made it to the far side of the hill and we were out of the wind. John is a heavy set person and didn't seem to be in as bad of shape as me. He told me we were going to die if we couldn't start a fire.

I told him that I had a "fire starter kit" in my fishing vest in the canoe. It was in the back pocket but I had this pocket open because this is also where I had my crankbaits. We were using crankbaits trying for Lake Trout. I knew that my fishing vest was still in the canoe because I had seen it there. I shoved it under my seat before we entered the lake with the big waves. At least I did one thing right!

This is where the story takes a strange turn.....The only reason I had a fire starter kit was because I won it in a contest in a magazine. They wanted someone to put a caption to a cartoon. I won the first prize! They sent me lots of lures and other stuff. They also sent the fire starter kit! I just stuck it in my vest in case of a hard rain or something.

John looked in my fishing vest and did not find the fire starter kit. He did however find it floating on the shore. It only said "Fire Starting Kit" on one side of the package. It was floating with the label face up when John found it!

We got a fire started and began to think of how we would get back to the base camp. We could only see one of the paddles for our canoe. It was on the far side of the crossing where we entered the big lake. John tried to swim there once but the water was too deep and cold to reach it. He came back to warm by the fire. We had decided that once the wind had died down we would use a stick/ pole to push ourselves along the shoreline back to our camp.

We would not give up. We were going to make it back home!

While we were drying our clothes, standing naked next to the fire, I thought, I heard someone yelling. John told me I was just hearing birds or something. We looked out into the lake area but we didn't see anything. Our canoe was still swamped beside the cliffs.

Out of the blue a woman and a teenaged boy approached us at our fire. We were in our underwear and nothing else as our clothes were hanging from some branches by the fire.

The woman felt embarrased as she caught us in our skivies and started to leave. We practically tackled her and told her of our adventure.

Her husband had rounded up our paddles and some of our other possesions by this time and when we met him and his other son on the shore we thanked them for their help. The man and his wife saved us and we wanted to give them a real thanks but they just wanted to move along down through the lakes.

We still don't know who came to our rescue to this day.