Submitted photo The author and his son AJ pose with a 29-inch walleye caught and released from the dock on Lake Benton.

Memorial Day weekend, and the unofficial start of summer, more and more finds me on the move. As friends’ kids grow up, graduate, get married, and my own — a bit younger — find themselves loose for summer; our activities shift, our travels increase, and the era of spending three days and four nights fishing appears distant in life’s rearview mirror. But those memories are fond and often come rushing back as I find a way to squeeze in whatever time on the water I can during the late spring holiday. 


And so, this year’s travels found me at the end of a dock on southwest Minnesota’s Lake Benton, where my godson Gavin and his brother Lincoln live. Sandwiched between Saturday baseball games and Sunday’s high school graduation ceremony for Gavin, the twilight brought those boys and my own together with me casting into the waters of the prairie lake and I thought of the hundreds, if not thousands, of fish we had landed together, and the ones that stood out in memory. 


There was of course the small farm pond west of Marshall, where I had taken both Gavin and Lincoln on their first ice fishing trips and my oldest boy AJ for early panfishing forays. The crappies of up to 14 inches were something of legend among us, and we talked about them in almost hushed reverence with the last light of the setting sun. There were trips up to our family cabin in Detroit Lakes, where just a couple of years ago, in the most nerve wracking moment as a net man, I scooped up a 62-inch sturgeon that Gavin had hooked and battled from the depths to the side of the boat, an amazing experience that always comes up when we connect. 


There were bass trips and walleye trips, chance meetings in northeastern Minnesota where parts of both our families reside, and connections here and there as our worlds linked and diverged in the streambed of life. All along, I have been the hook baiter, the net man, the snack packer, and the advice giver, sharing what I knew about the species we were targeting, and the ways to fish them that had always worked best for me. As night set in and spring began its switch to summer on a warm southern breeze, our roles reversed for the first time. 


“Oh, I want that fish back,” I growled to Lincoln, as my knees buckled following a hookset that went hard into a strike about 20 feet off the dock, with the jig-and-plastic combo sliding loose just a second after, “it felt like a brick.” 


He laughed, and we kept casting, while together we organized my kids’ bright red light-up bobber lines around our jigs as Gavin cast on the far side of the dock, steering clear of the field of monofilament in front of us. The first stars emerged with the quarter moon and the last pleasure cruising boats of the evening began to make their way back to shore. In the growing shade of evening another thump shook my rod, and my hookset this time made firm contact with the weight at the other end. 


The fish didn’t move, it sat shaking its head: rolling, twisting, turning with every ounce of muscle it owned. It was too steadfast to its position to be a northern, though I felt the scrape of teeth on the line which made me nervous on two fronts, and it certainly wasn’t a small walleye as the medium-light rod doubled over with its bulk in the depths. As it gave a bit of ground to my retrieval efforts, I turned and instructed my oldest boy, AJ, to give the net over to Gavin and as I looked away, Lincoln reported.


“It’s a walleye, a big one, I just saw its white belly as it turned there,” he stated, poin