Mysteries solved? Local boaters do their best to get to the bottom of a couple of puzzling boating occurrences.
Our neighborhood made the boating news twice in 2024, stories that have fueled the offseason hot-stove league here at the Lake View Inn, where everyone is welcome to their opinion. I’m almost certain you heard about Ryan Borgwardt, the fellow who tried to stage his drowning in Big Green Lake this past August. I got calls and texts from all over the country on this one.
Borgwardt flips his kayak into the lake, leaving behind ID and a tackle box, and then paddles a little tube to shore, where he has stashed an e-bike, which he rides 60 miles to Madison, where he catches a bus to Michigan, crosses into Canada, then catches a flight to meet a woman in Georgia. The Republic of, not the state. But for a month, everyone thought the poor guy had drowned in the state’s deepest lake. Everyone, of course, except my good friend Chuck Larson, who has watched many episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, and immediately smelled a rat.
“Using my Spock logic, I deduce this is a ruse,” Chuck said after a week of high-tech searching had not located a corpse. “Nobody fishes Big Green from a kayak, especially that side of the lake. The wake reverb off the sandstone bluff makes it too rough. And the water is 260 feet deep. Was he trolling for lake trout from a kayak? I don’t think so. Finally, they found his life jacket. Have you ever seen a kayaker not wearing a life jacket? My next call would be to check his passport records.”
read more at boatingmag.com.
