Mitch Calvert
Video footage: http://fortfrances.tv/videos/KfVkCu-WwmI
Kent and Steve Ballan may not have challenged for their second Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championship title over the weekend, but they accomplished something just as satisfying.
The brothers, along with Kent’s wife, Michelle, and Len Bedard, saved a young moose from drowning last week while pre-fishing ahead of the tournament.
“We were just fishing a series of rock piles and we looked over and about 500-600 yards away we saw this thing swimming around,” Steve Ballan noted.
“At first we thought it was a bear, but we noticed a cabin over there, so we thought it might’ve been a dog,” he added.
“We kept watching it from afar and it was swimming around in circles in the same circle for 40 minutes or so.”
The foursome got suspicious and decided to go in for a closer look.
“We got curious and went over to see what it was, and here was this moose with either a rope or net or heavy fishing line stuck on her leg keeping her in the water,” Ballan recounted.
“We followed her in circles until we could catch her and then got a rope on her and tried to start pulling her to shore at first, but whatever was stuck on her wouldn’t let go so the boat was going in circles, too.”
Whatever was holding the moose in place—Steve felt something on its leg but didn’t know exactly what it was—seemed to pop loose momentarily during the whole process.
“It seemed to come loose, Lenny grabbed onto her from the side of the boat and I was running the trolling motor, and we started going slow to get it to an island, but then it got stuck again,” Ballan lamented.
“Because the boat was moving forward and Lenny was holding onto her, she started going under, but Lenny and I just grabbed onto her quick and heaved as hard as we could and whatever it was came off again.”
They eventually towed the moose to the island shore—with Bedard eventually being pulled overboard by the moose—but it seemed more than happy to stay by their side.
“Once we got her to shore, it just stood there right in front of the boat, and I was petting it and we were talking to it,” Ballan noted.
“We were trying to get it to go up on the island and lay down and relax, but it just stood there shaking.
“We just backed away and let her be. We watched her for well over an hour and she stayed right there in the water near shore,” he added.
Ballan said the near-drowning experience was just the tip of the iceberg for the moose that day.
“It must’ve been attacked by a bear or something because there were two three- to four-inch scrapes and then a single one on her back, so we’re assuming it jumped in the lake to escape and then got caught up,” he remarked.
“That moose had a helluva day.”
It was a well-timed rescue because when they arrived on the scene, the moose was barely above water.
“It must’ve been close [to drowning] because when we got there, she was huffing and puffing and her eyes were rolling back in her head,” Ballan recalled.
“We saw it there for 40 minutes and we have no idea how long it was there before that.”
Michelle was overcome with emotions when they finally got the moose to safety. Kent actually captured the entire scene on two cameras, and the brothers are hoping to make DVDs of the one-of-a-kind rescue.
“He [Kent] taped from when we first came up to it to when we got it to shore and then his memory card got full,” Steve Ballan noted.
“But from when we were on shore, there’s another six minutes and 13 seconds he got on mine.”
