Our winters may be long and dark, but Minnesotans have a host of strategies to make it through with good cheer. One of the most gratifying of these is to plan the summer’s fun. Which is exactly what Maple Grove buddies Dave Ramler, Doug Schon and Willis Hannenberg did last winter: they planned a pontoon trip to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee rivers. The fellas had to stay loose with the plan, knowing that unpredictable weather, uncertain marina facilities and lock traffic could stretch the trip anywhere between 17 to 30 days. In May, they kissed their wives goodbye for who-knew-how-long and took off downstream.
A pontoon is a flat-bottomed boat that floats on hollow barrels. One of its virtues is its remarkable stability; the other is its relatively low cost and maintenance. Each friend had a specific role on the Steamboat Willy: Ramler was the blogger, Schon the navigator, and Hannenberg the pontoon owner and captain, a role he earned by his constant presence on Fish Lake. “Every season, he’s the first one in the water and the last one out,” says Ramler, “he’s the kind of fanatic who insists there are eight months of boating in Minnesota.”
They started as far north as possible, in Camden Bay two lock-and-dams above Lock No. 1. They had a total of 41 locks to negotiate with drops as small as three feet or as precipitous as 85, and a grand total of an 860 foot drop. Pleasure craft are last in the lock queue, allowed to pass only after military, barges, and commercial fishing. “There was one barge we leapfrogged with for four days,” recounts Schon, “finally the lock master took pity on us and pushed us through ahead of them.” If their timing was off, the trio might have to wait hours to pass through a lock.
The weather was extraordinarily cooperative. The hairiest event struck early in the trip while crossing Lake Pepin, MN. As far as the group knew, it would be as stormy and rough the whole time, and they thanked their lucky stars for the boat’s enclosure. But from then on out it was proverbial smooth sailing.
Sometimes things got wacky. “With a lot of time and some beer, it happens,” Schon explains in reference to a frenzied episode of air guitar caught on video. “You’d think it would get boring, but it never did,” says Ramler. “There was always some little job to take care of, something new to see.”
There were many marvelous sights indeed: the breathtakingly white river bluffs in Iowa; the variety and ingenuity of bridges; osprey nests on top of mile markers. As they neared the south, they noticed confederate flags, industrial sized bottles of hot sauce and a group of noodlers—guys catching catfish with their bare hands.
“What impressed me was the friendliness,” says Schon, “marina people don’t care if you have a 1,000 cruise boat or a pontoon. We shared brats, beers, chat.” For the most part, the guys did their own cooking, ripping through a case of beans and devising creative ways to prepare spam. “As long as we had a can of spam, we were all set,” says Schon with pride.
After 19 days, the three scruffy river rats reunited with their wives in Florida, where they hitched up the pontoon and drove back north. The trip was considered a success. “We’re still friends,” says Schon, “let’s put it that way.” There are more epic trips in the works for the trio. They plan to take the Mississippi to St. Louis then head north along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers to the Great Lakes up to Duluth. Perhaps one day they will do “the big loop,” a several-month journey around Florida and through the Great Lakes. After all, every Minnesotan needs a dream to get through the winter.
