Daily Limit: Storm sends Jocumsen camp scrambling

Crazy occurrences are more memorable, Carl Jocumsen says, which is why a recent camping trip will wind up being a conversation topic for years.

The Bassmaster Elite Series angler, his wife, Kayla, and her family experienced a wonderful outdoors experience until a storm stronger than forecast ended up being life-threatening. Their group of eight was among the two dozen people enjoying primitive island campsites in Idaho’s Priest Lake when the front blew through, sending them scrambling to stay safe between raging waves and falling trees.

“It was an eye-opener for sure,” said Jocumsen, the Australia native who won the Lake Tenkiller Elite last season. “After it’s all said and done, we’ll talk about it forever, this crazy experience. We just got lucky that no one got hurt. It could have been way worse than it was.”

All was idyllic for the first three days of the getaway, the first time Kayla’s family had gotten together in 16 years. Priest Lake is in the Idaho panhandle close to the Canadian border, and it presents majestic mountain views and a bounty of lake trout.

“You’re up north in the middle of nowhere, just a beautiful lake, incredible countryside right up amongst the mountains,” Jocumsen said. “There’s grizzly bears, mountain lions, wolves, moose. Water is just crystal clear, you can see 30, 40 feet down.”

The campsites allowed tents to be pitched feet from the water’s edge, and Jocumsen reveled in his view from the sleeping bag — mountains, slick water and his Bass Cat feet away with Talons down. He said he’d wake and take a run on the trail then return for a refreshing morning swim before coffee and breakfast. The days were spent taking in the splendor and fishing for campfire cooked meals of lake trout.

“We were just having an incredible time,” he said.

Despite weak cell service, Jocumsen kept up with the weather the best he could, and one evening saw a lake wind advisory for the next day. They weren’t too concerned because the forecast wasn’t that bad, and they were leaving in the morning. Waking to glassy conditions, Carl recorded a video of Roo the Bass Dog on the beach.

“Literally five minutes after that video, it started blowing,” he said. “It was a cold front that brought rain and snow. It was ripping, our stuff just blowing everywhere. We went from trying to hold tents to don’t worry about anything. Save ourselves, keep everyone safe.”

While no one grabbed a camera during the storm surge, the aftermath was recorded, like this pine tree crashing on their gear.

They pushed one of their boats up the beach to prevent it from sinking — other campers on the island had three boats sink — and Jocumsen and two others attempted to keep his tournament boat from crashing on rocks. He went from not wanting to get wetter or colder to being chest deep and trying to figure out how to save his boat. There was no way to anchor it with building waves. Then they had a really close call.

“A tree crashed through out campsite and just missed Kayla’s mom, just missed Roo and crushed a lot of our stuff laying there,” he said. “It got life threatening real quick. You had 20 feet of beach, 5-foot waves crashing on one side and giant pine trees falling on the other. You had nowhere to go.”

With everyone OK, he jumped in the boat, started the engine, put it into gear and, “I gave it one squirt and I just got over the next wave. One more would have dumped my boat straight on the rocks. I turned around, and it was complete chaos.”

Everyone was unharmed when Jocumsen hollered his plan to drive to the leeward side of the island. After a frigid ride made worse by spearing waves, he parked the boat and was about to start his 2-mile run back to camp when he realized he had no shoes. Fortunately, there was a pair of flip flops in the boat.

“I thought somebody was going to be hurt, so I’m sprinting as fast as I could run in flip flops through this forest of pine trees,” he said. “All I can hear is crashing pine trees the entire run. I’ve never been as fearful for my safety as I was on that run. Branches are hitting me the entire time. It was nuts. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen.”

Everyone was still OK, but with cold rain, snow and winds still whipping, the group decided to trek back to the safer side of the island to wait it out. A trip back for food later in the day had Carl witness another close call.

“We’re near the campsite, and we hear a massive pine tree come crashing down,” he said. “Then we see a guy and his wife are walking out of there. He’s just white. His eyes as big as they can get. He was in the outhouse, and the tree missed it by a foot.”

Waves continued to roll into their campsite throughout the day, a tree missed the occupied outhouse by a few feet and boats of their camping neighbors sunk.

The Jocumsen party waited until nearly 4 in the afternoon before packing up and braving two boat trips back to their vehicles. It was still rough, but they needed to get off the island as it kept getting colder. They felt fortunate to only lose the cooler, a barbecue pit and some tent posts.

“Other than that, we did pretty well to salvage everything,” Jocumsen said. “We could have lost two boats. It could have been crazy. The actions we took early really saved out stuff.”

Carl and Kayla, experienced campers on their travails on the Bassmaster tournament circuits, offered calm heads to approach the group’s situation.

“We stayed pretty calm,” she said. “We go through so much stuff on the road anywhere, you almost expect stuff like that to happen. My family camps, but they don’t run into sticky situations like that very often, so they were a bit panicky.”

Carl detailed some of his experiences growing up in Australia, like when his group got stuck in mud and lived out of a car for a couple days. He said it is occurrences like these that make the most memories.

“The fishing trips where everything went perfect, those stories don’t get brought up and talked about near as much as the crazy, adversity adventures that I had as a kid with my grandad and cousins,” he said. “We always talk about the ones where things got crazy. Those are the ones you remember.

“Those experiences help you grow. When you get through something like that, you learn about everyone, yourself, how you deal with situations. You just grow, as long as no one got hurt. You never want that to happen. We’re still telling stories about little things that happened through this whole ordeal, and will probably forever.”

The Jocumsens made it home with trout meat to vacuum seal and a lot of stories.