116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Wild Side: Learning to weather the weather
Author has about seen it all, and really just wants more time to fish in decent conditions
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Many people — in Scandinavia, especially — live by a saying that sounds like a slogan dreamt up by an ad agency representing North Face sportswear: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.”
While proper attire can ameliorate some of the effects of bad weather, it cannot alter the fact that much weather — perhaps most — is bad.
Some weather — tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos, hailstorms, floods, droughts, heat waves, wild fires, for example —is so hostile and destructive that clothing is irrelevant.
Among less extreme types of weather, wind has almost no redeeming qualities. Its chill factor makes 10 above feel like 10 below. It can down power lines, topple trees and de-shingle your roof.
On an even less extreme level, wind causes big waves that can make for a rough, wet boat ride, if it does not actually swamp your boat.
It blows a bow into your fishing line, which makes it harder to track your lure and easier to wind up in a snag. It blows the hat off your head and the sap buckets off your maple trees.
Snow is bad weather unless you’re tracking a deer or hopelessly romantic about a white Christmas. It hinders walking and driving and increases the danger of each while necessitating shoveling and plowing.
Combine snow with wind and falling temperatures, such as prevailed last weekend in northern Iowa, and you get a blizzard.
The right clothing won’t keep you safe from slick roads and zero visibility. Nor could it save the 235 people, mostly school children, who perished in the schoolhouse blizzard that ravaged the Great Plains on Jan. 12, 1888, or the 146, mostly duck hunters and Lake Michigan sailors, who died in the 1940 Armistice Day blizzard.
Just in my short, sheltered life I have been exposed to weather so bad that no clothing could ever have helped.
I recall crossing South Dakota’s Lake Oahe in an unseaworthy rented boat when a sudden squall kicked up waves that eventually filled the boat. I can still see our beer cooler floating away.
I recall two friends and I caught in a sudden electrical storm two miles from shore on Wisconsin’s Castle Rock Flowage in an underpowered Starcraft that had never been on plane since it was built. I can still hear the ominous buzzing of graphite fishing rods, the desperate prayers of my friends and my own humming of a song I learned in Navy boot camp: Eternal father strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave… O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.
Unlike extreme weather, which is all bad all the time, most of our every day weather is benign. Few weathers are as welcome as gentle rain when the earth is dry or temperate sunshine when it’s wet. Unfortunately our default setting seems to be too much or not enough of either.
My definition of bad weather is any that keeps me from fishing the river. In 2025 the river was off limits in January, February and December, covered in ice, and in July, August and most of September following excessive rains that rendered it high, swift and muddy.
Looking ahead to 2026, I’ll settle for another six months of open water fishing and weather that’s not half bad.
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