Fathers Day, renewed tradition and nutter butter cookies

About 30 years ago when my sons were very small, my wife and I began a Fathers Day tradition where we lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.....spending Fathers Day fishing! We did this for years then life happened, the boys became young men and interests changed, selling the boat didn’t help either, but a piece of property came up and the quickest thing I could sell to seal the deal was our beloved boat.
My sons grew up and had families, got busy.....we all know how that goes, but lately I could interest one or the other to go fishing, I even made YouTube videos of it to look back on the event.
A couple weeks ago I asked them what they were doing on Fathers Day and as it worked out they both had no plans, so we decided to try a nearby lake.
We stopped at a store to buy bait and other needed things and my oldest son said “ I got us something in remembrance of one of the best fisherman we knew” and gave us each a small carton of whole milk and a nutter butter cookie sleeve



It took me a minute to think of who he was referring to and then he said, the best fisherman he knew that we fished with always packed these items, then it hit me, our old family friend(now deceased) Wayne VanRemortel.
Steve Jr thought we should include this into our new revived tradition, and it must have worked! We were on the fish for hours! It began to rain so I put up the Bimini top and we started longlining from under the shelter it provided



The rains quit and we resumed fishing along docks







It was fun to say the least, felt great to be spending Father’s Day again like we had so many years ago, the conversations were much different, and the laughter was more frequent.....and it was decided that we needed to make time and do this again as a yearly tradition, it did feel a little different without my wife Judy with us, but we will get her to go with us next year.
Very relaxing day, no phone calls or text messages were taken, no YouTube video was made, just us with no cares and no stress.
At some point we needed to stop and looking into the livewell we had a bunch to clean



I called Judy telling her we would be off the water soon and had enough for a family fish fry around 5:00, so she started prepping while we cleaned fish and invited my dad over who just turned 94



I do need to take my dad but yesterday was not a good day for him to be out.
At the end of the day we boated close to a 100 fish, I even had an alleged Walleye on that I didn’t get in the boat.
We had a great meal, a fantastic day and a new revived family tradition in place





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