I cast the Johnson Silver Minnow across the weed bed as far as I could. The old Pflueger Skilcast reel hummed and stopped as my “educated thumb” reacted to the splash over the weed bed. Handing the rod over to Dad, I kept the boat positioned and watched and waited as his arthritic hands slowly crawled the spoon back to the boat. Due to macular degeneration, he could not see when the retrieve was complete and relied on the swivel of the wire leader hitting the rod tip to indicate it was time for another cast.

He handed the rod back. I cast again, he retrieved. It was the last day of that week’s fishing trip, and we repeated this scenario for several hours in my personal, somewhat desperate, attempt to give him a better chance at catching one more of the lunker pike that for so long he had loved to catch. Unfortunately, the fishing gods in Stevens Bay, Lake of the Woods, that afternoon did not reward him with the potential bonus fish we were after. The past week spent on the water had proved difficult, but not impossible nor completely fruitless for this tough old guy.

By that year, 1996, at age 91, Alfred Krejca, on numerous trips, had explored, camped, and fished the Canadian side of the lake for 60 years, and had chalked up a prior 9 years of trips, beginning in 1926, into the wilds of northern Minnesota. Sixty years earlier, just down the shore a half-hour troll away from where we now fished, he and his friend, so much younger and so lost, had motored up to the beach at the Indian reserve to ask directions. That two weeks of camping and fishing in the wilderness, the first of many in this area, had just begun. Picturesque details of all these trips continued to surface for Al, who had an amazing memory and over the years revived the sometimes humorous and always interesting stories of his north woods wilderness adventures in a very consistent manner with anyone who would listen. The lighting of a campfire during a north woods trip, in particular, would enable the start of another round of his past adventures.

In backup of his stories, he had accumulated a rich kaleidoscope-like legacy of pictures, diaries, correspondence, and anything else that related to his favorite reason for living.

This is the story of this unique, but humble ordinary working man who loved both nature and fishing, and who, in his words, “Saw a lot, did a lot, fished a lot, did OK.”