Love your messages MM!

I too am kind of an old timer. Been going to the TFF since 1960 when I was 13. That was when they marked the channel up to the dam with red flags on top of logs. Stay between the flags and you were safe. The flags stopped at the dam.

Myself, my younger brother and a close friend (still joins us on our fall trips) had the boat from about 10 am until 4 pm or so every day. We always figured, the hell with the flags, we wanted to explore. So we headed out into the Big Waters or to the Lake ten area and just killed the walleyes (6.5 hp motor no less and yes, we had about a dozen shear pins).

So one day I walk into the lodge at O'Meara's resort where we always stayed (later became Idle Shores) with our stringer of walleyes. The bar was loaded at mid afternoon and everyone was impressed. One guy asked where we caught them and I said l
Lake Ten. He replied, "oh, I thought you were fishing the flowage". I said "we were, Lake Ten is one of the original lakes that were flooded when the flowage was created. It's past the dam to Sandy Point and then hang a right". He looks at me and says "past the dam"! Almost nobody went past the dam back then.

So that evening my dad tells me he wants to fish where we caught all those fish this afternoon. We head out, motor past the dam, get to Sandy Point and he shuts off the motor. Ahead of us was a log infested nightmare, but for us kids it was fun. I said "why did you stop? We still have to go at least another mile". He looks at me and says, "we're not going in there", and we didn't.

I didn't get my dad to the Lake Ten area until I had my own family and took him in my boat, about 20 years later.