FARGO — Winding along Leaf Lake in Minnesota on a fishing boat trailing five others one breezy day last June, Carla St. Germain threw her hands jubilantly into the air.
“I’m so happy!” she said aloud. “It was the culmination of a three-year quest … and I had no idea how much they were going to love it.”
St. Germain isn’t a born leader. But when Hope Lutheran’s previous outdoor event for women of her parish, Women in Tents — involving a small group of women hiking in the mountains of western Montana — dissipated after the leading pastor left, she yearned for another way to enjoy God’s nature with women.
She proposed the idea several times to current leaders at Hope North, where she worships, and each time, they were receptive, but no one volunteered to initiate it.
“My husband finally said, ‘You’re going to have to make it happen yourself,’” she said. “He almost tried to talk me out of it,” warning her how much work it would be.
But an interior nudge persisted, and finally, St. Germain got to work.
She named her dream “Women on Water,” or WOW, patterned after the earlier event, and set about finding people willing to offer their fishing boats and expertise, along with women interested in fishing.
As the details unfolded, she said, she was assured the Holy Spirit was at work.
Fishing with father revived
Deb Wald had been tapped to facilitate a devotional for the women to reflect on their experience following the fishing. It would happen at a stopping point, after being refreshed with food provided by St. Germain and others.
The proposal lit something in her heart — an old memory of fishing with her father as a little girl.
“If we would be at the lake, I would wake my dad up early, with his permission, at 4 a.m. That’s how much I loved to go fishing,” she said. “If you go early, the sun is just coming up and the fish are hungry.”
Though she grew up with three sisters and a brother, her brother wasn’t into fishing, she said. So she took up the charge, and it turned into a very special time of bonding with her dad.
“My dad and I were always very close, and the fishing aspect of it was one of those things that, growing up in a bigger family, it was a chance to be alone with my dad. And those were really precious moments.”
Though catching fish was the goal, there was another bigger benefit. “It’s very peaceful and it’s a time where you can connect with the everyday things in life that you can’t always,” she said. “You’re one-on-one, building a relationship and learning a skill at the same time that stays with you.”
Wald’s father died in 2020, but that morning in June happened to be the Saturday before Father’s Day 2024. On the way out to the meeting point, she recalled saying, in her heart, “Dad, you know I’d love for you to be in the boat with me today.”
“And then,” she said, “I tell you what — the abundance of fish I caught that day was incredible!”
A longtime widow who hadn’t been fishing in a while, Wald added, “To have that connection again in this kind of way, I didn’t know what to expect, but you just trust that you’ve been put in the right place for a reason. I had no idea that I would feel the joy that I felt from all of it.”
Fishermen at the helm
Because the women would need fishing boats, and they were all owned by men who were expert fishermen, though the event was for women, it ended up producing several side blessings involving their counterparts.
“We ended up with six men willing to take the day to provide bait, boats, rods and their expertise,” St. Germain said. They also had to limit how many women could participate, with the boats each able to only accommodate several participants.
Like Wald, she thought a lot about her own father that day. “It brought back so many good memories. It was so heartwarming. And the women were all singing the praises of their boat captains, and how patient they were.”
They told the men that without their help, they’d just be fishing from docks. But the guys seemed to get something from it too, St. Germain said. One told her that fishing had become boring for him, and that he was no longer finding the joy in it he once had.
“He told me, ‘Today has given me back my joy,’” she said, in being able to introduce the women to fishing — or revive their old memories of it. “Most men love to share what they love to do. They were definitely the hands and feet of Christ to us.”
A bountiful beginning
By the end of the day, the women had more than 100 fish in the boats, mainly pan fish, St. Germain said, like perch, crappy and bluegill, with one exception. “Deb caught a walleye!” The men came through once again, cleaning the fish and preparing them for the women to bring home to cook.
“Everyone just really connected with their good memories from the past, connected with nature and connected with God,” she said, “along with strengthening our bonds with other women.”
Paulette Aleckson moved to Fargo from Minnesota when her children relocated here several years ago. Though she’s enjoyed fishing with relatives through the years, she doesn’t own a boat, nor have people with whom to fish these days.
“That day, I caught quite a few. I was one of the first in our boat to catch one,” she said, noting that they kept moving the boats around to find the hot spots. “It was really a wonderful day. The whole thing was just a God thing.”
The day wasn’t without foibles, however. After all the planning and food preparation, St. Germain said, “the devil had to mess it up a bit,” with 40 miles per hour winds threatening to spoil things. Thankfully, her husband, Randy, took the day off from work the day prior, and found an alternative spot from the original that was more protected from the elements.
As the boats arrived at shore, a team of volunteers ran the lunches out to participants. “The men nicknamed the women ‘WOWsers,’” St. Germain said, and soon, conversations commenced about what worked, and what didn’t. “The men were swapping ideas about bait, location and depth.”
A satisfying conclusion
For the devotional, the women sat in a circle in lawn chairs as Wald led them in a meditation on what Jesus taught his disciples about trust while fishing, reflecting on whether, when Jesus casts his net, “Are you going to swim into Jesus’ net or away from it?”
St. Germain said that just being in nature can bring us closer to God. She and Randy also enjoy “tramping around the woods looking for mushrooms,” and find themselves constantly amazed by the beauty of God’s world: “the colors of the changing season, the blue of the sky, the green of the trees.”
With the success of the first WOW event now in the books, plans have begun for another this summer.
“If I close my eyes and think about that day, all I see is light and warmth,” Wald said, remarking again on the thoughtfulness of the men. “You think of hospitality and generosity and just God’s graciousness. They could not have been any more generous, with just their good humor and expertise. It was truly incredible.”
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Feb. 23, 2025.]
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