Lake Ontario Almost Killed Me

After President Trump's antics around trying to rename Lake Ontario, a terrifying memory from my childhood came rushing back to me

The thing they don't tell you about the Great Lakes is that their waves don't behave like the ocean. When you think of terrifying, life threatening storms, most people will think of the towering mountainous wave from the 2000 film The Perfect Storm.

But I think of a fishing trip on Lake Ontario with my family when I was about 12 years old or so.

Earlier this week, in the midst of the dumbest trade war of all time, Trump tried to mock Canada by attempting to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America," making it the second body of water my dad has fished in that the president has tried to rename America.

Nobody tell Trump about the pond my dad likes to fish in Maine.

WATCH: Trump signs order changing Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’

The president signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. Trump cannot force Canada to follow his preferred naming convention, however.

PBS NewsMichelle L. Price, Associated Press

I come from a hunting and fishing family, despite not really having much interest in either myself growing up. But my dad and brother loved both, and my mom and I were often forced to go along for the ride.

We would make multiple trips every summer (both of my parents were teachers and had summers off) up to the various ports on Lake Ontario in our family motorhome to fish for salmon and steelhead. We would use downriggers to send our lures deep and troll around various areas where we knew certain types of fish would be hanging out based on the conditions. My brother was an absolute geek (complimentary) about it and eventually became a charter captain on the lake in his adulthood.

I developed a family reputation for quickly retiring to our boat's tiny cabin–literally just a bed and a crawlspace–to read a book and nap until it was my turn to reel in a fish. The joke was that I slept the whole time, only to wake up and reel in the biggest fish of the trip.

At age 10, I won a major, lake-wide fishing derby in the youth division by reeling in a 15 lb 9 oz Rainbow Trout. There was a whole trophy presentation on a big stage at the New York State Fair in Syracuse. We had to scramble and drive several hours to get there in time from our campground in a little town called Olcott, NY.

I remember barely being able to lift the fish for photos, and several adults tried to question me over whether or not it was actually me who reeled in the fish. I promise you I did. And I also caught an even larger salmon that same day.

But I pretty much stopped going after I almost died on the water a year or two later.

My longtime social media followers will likely remember bits of this story. In school, whenever we'd be assigned a personal essay, I would write about the time Lake Ontario almost killed me and I almost always got an A. The memories of it now are a bit hazy in my middle age, but nevertheless, here is how I almost died:

We would typically avoid the lake if the weather was going to be dangerous, but that morning as the sun rose, the sky was perfectly clear and the forecast called for a bright, sunny summer day.

We'd often go out alongside my godfather and his family and his boat and keep in occasional contact via the radio and we also did so that day. The two boats chugged slowly through the river in the early morn away from the marina in Olcott, past the breaker wall out into the open lake.

I will forever remember the little bait shop in Olcott. It has a sign missing a couple letters, so it read "Olcott Ait & Ackle." The phrase is still a running joke in my family to this day.

On our boat, it was me, my dad, my older brother, a friend of my dad's and his son Jimmy, who was about my age and also my friend. Instead of chairs on the passenger side of the boat, we would keep an extra large cooler where we would keep soda and pre-cooked fried chicken (and also we put the Doritos in there for some reason) for lunch. This is also where we would put the fish we would catch.

We put two cushions on top of the cooler so folks could sit there and that is where Jimmy and I, were sitting.

It was a gorgeous day in the morning, but we didn't have any luck with the fish. I remember my brother being frustrated that he couldn't conjure a strategy to bring in some fish for our family friends. At one point mid-morning we caught a forecast that called for 2-3 feet waves, nothing our 20 foot boat couldn't handle.

Later that morning, my godfather radioed to say that they were tired of not catching anything and with the choppy waves, they had enough. But my brother had other ideas. He proposed that we go way out into the interior of the lake to troll deeper waters. I got a little excited, sometimes if we went far enough, on a clear day, we could see the Toronto skyline.

We turned the boat north and headed 14 knots out from port. I don't remember if this decision led to us catching any more fish that day. Fish were the least of our concerns that day.