Logo.

World famous angler Franck Hiribarne of France (photo on left) recently engaged my services as a guide to help him land the trophy fish of a lifetime — a musky — which had always eluded him. Our three-day expedition on Lake St. Francis, one hour west of Montreal, was both exciting and successful. So exciting, in fact, that word got out and an old journalism friend, Warren Perley, founder and chief editor of a new ad-free, long-form journalism site called BestStory.ca convinced me to share our adventure with the public, resulting in a story in excess of 5,000 words and 20 photos describing the drama behind the scenes. Below is a teaser for the story with a link to the BestStory.ca site, where you can buy the article itself for 40 cents using a credit card through PayPal. You can read the story from any web-enabled device, including a tablet or smart phone, and you have access to re-read any story purchased on the site forever. Hope you enjoy Franck’s amazing fishing adventures as much as I have. Read More »

It made perfect sense to want to spend our last day on earth fishing. It seemed natural that if there was going to be an apocalypse the best place to witness this cataclysmic event would be on a lake fishing. If one knew the exact time of their death and had the option of choosing their exit strategy from life, an option given to us by the Mayans that predicted this day as the end of all days, could there be a more ideal fashion than going out chasing some end of days browns and rainbows on a five weight? I think not so armed with my inflatable boat and fly rods in the truck we headed away across the Champlain bridge and south down highway 10 towards the Eastern Townships. As if by serendipitous chance, the  date of the opening of the winter trout season coincided with the Mayan end of the world and the unseasonably milder temperatures had kept the lake open, for normally this time of the year it would be covered under a foot of ice. Lake Massawippi, straddled between the sleepy towns of North Hatley and Ayer’s Cliff, is arguably one of the most picturesque lakes in the area.  Read More »

As it is with people, the life of a fishing rod can terminate in a variety of ways. Some live long and prosperous lives, beating all odds and avoiding the many pitfalls of life, while others less fortunate fall victim to the vagaries of accident or disease, their lives claimed before their time. It can be as sudden and inglorious as a traffic accident, or perhaps carelessly broken in a car door or trunk, or worse still, trod upon by a careless friend, or maybe even fall victim to a low ceiling fan with an insatiable hunger for rod tips. On other occasions, it can also be in the blazing glory of battle, under the weight of a large fish, when an overexerted rod has a sudden coronary and the graphite explodes into an aneurism of fibers unable to maintain their corporal integrity. But no matter how the death occurs, as it is with people, there is always a deep sense of personal loss. There is nothing as obvious in life as that which has been lost. Read More »

All my life I have been fascinated by culverts. There is something about them, not from a civil engineering perspective but from a fisherman’s standpoint, that inspires the imagination and fuels a vague optimism that despite all the rapid changes taking place in our landscape, there was still a faint glimmer of hope that life could sometimes flourish in the unlikeliest of places. Since early childhood, creeks have always played an important role in my streamside education where it was quickly learned that brook trout, the gleaming jewels of these bodies of water, only thrived in the most pristine and beautiful places where the water flowed cold and clear and clean from the hills. From beneath the logs and stones that cluttered these little creeks, dark shadows would quickly dart out into the current to hit your fly or worm and then just as quickly, return to the safety of cover. Sometimes the creeks ran under the gravel road through a stone or steel culvert, spilling into deep pools that formed beneath that often harbored large schools of trout.  Culvert pools were veritable magnets to trout in the summer for they offered cold and deep water that remained well oxygenated throughout the entire year and held an abundance of food. All in all, a perfect micro habitat for trout to reside although admittedly, not all culverts were created equally, nor do they all hold fish. A good culvert, in my estimation, would usually hold a dozen or so trout.   Read More »

It has been a while since my last post as we have rented a cottage in the Laurentians during the entire month of July. The weather has been spectacular, sunny and warm every day and for the first few weeks, despite been surrounded by babbling brooks and countless lakes teeming with trout, the agenda has not included much fishing. Instead, my wife and I take long romantic hikes through the woods, sit idly on our porch with its million dollar view of the green mountains, listen to the birds singing in the trees, watch life go by and generally don’t do much other than eat and sleep. It is an idyllic life, as close to living like a canine without having to eat from a bowl or take your morning dump outdoors. Read More »

One of my main fishing partners is an actor and as such is often prone to fits of embellishment and excessive emoting, perhaps somewhat of an occupational hazard as a character actor typecast into bad guy roles, so it was not without a healthy degree of skepticism on my behalf when he disclosed the secret location of a place that had apparently never been fished by humans since the beginning of time. This unsupported and historically inaccurate claim was fairly dubious, for we were not flying to virgin waters in the wilderness but rather fishing a spot within an hour of a major metropolis with over two million inhabitants.  Read More »

We headed back out to the flats today, hoping to duplicate yesterday’s results, but the conditions had changed and the situation proved slightly different. It was overcast and windy and casting our flies was difficult without landing them square in the back of our heads. The fish were no longer in the shallows, the cold nighttime temperatures had sent them scurrying back into the deeper water. The carp, however, had laid claim to the shallows and wallowed in pairs in the shallow water, a pre-ritual of their mating. The normally gin clear water was dark and sedimented. Puffs of silt exploded like clouds as we spooked a few of the sedentary ones resting on the bottom. Read More »

It turned out to be the perfect day for gar on the flats. The sun was shining brightly, the shallow waters had finally begun to warm and the gar, mostly congregated on the flats to both feed and spawn, were finally becoming active. The first fish to show up a week earlier were unwilling to hit our flies, still disoriented by the cold water.  They were now bunching up in the warm shallows, in some instances water no deeper than a few inches, sunning themselves, the males eagerly searching for a large female to pair up with and spawn. Often, the female was courted by several smaller gar, three or four males, all eagerly lining up to find favor and succeed in spawning with the queen. Read More »

It has been awhile since my last post and there are a few good reasons for this. The first reason has been the unseasonably warm temperatures experienced in March and the early Spring, which has made for some excellent fishing opportunities. It has been an unusual year and with low water levels the fish are all concentrated in the warm water and its almost like fishing in a barrel. One day my friend caught 51 fish in 51 consecutive casts. We have had a few great days fly-fishing where we caught several hundred fish apiece,  returning home every night with sore wrists and serious bass thumb and other assorted lacerations from gar and pike. Consequently, most of my time has been spent fishing and the blog has been somewhat neglected.( Hey, I’m only human) Besides, the fishing usually fuels the writing but for some reason, perhaps the creeping onset of middle-age,  there is a certain creative lassitude plaguing me that just can’t be shaken. Read More »

Despite what my passport reads, maybe I am really not at all Canadian. The first indication of this would be my incredible aversion to cold weather, my reaction to winter being similar to that of a black bear, whose sane response to the harshness of the season is hibernation until spring. The not so subtle second indication, a corollary of the first, would be that I do not ice fish. Depending on the temperatures in December, I will continue fishing until water freezes, then I retreat for the year and put my rods in cold storage. For some reason once the temperatures dip below zero, my metabolism refuses to adjust to the cold, almost as though my body lacks the anti-freeze ingredient neccesary to survive our harsh winters. When the water stops moving, so do I. A half decade worth of assorted injuries, as well as incipient arthritis in some of the aging joints, become acutely evident during the winter months. From January to the end of March I remain in a constant state of frigidity – even while indoors! While others are busy in their garages -  sharpening their augers, preparing their clams, tip-ups, sleds, vexilars, and all their other gear, eagerly anticipating the beginning of the hard water season, when the ice is thick enough for them to safely venture out upon the lakes - I have retreated to the relative warmth of my home. Read More »