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.

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. 

 It was the first lake I had ever fished, with my uncle for trout when I was six years old and it was here that I caught my first trout, so it only made perfect sense that if my fishing should end it should come full circle and end where it began.   

A light and playful snowfall began to swirl as we turned down the winding dirt road leading through the mountains towards the western shoreline of the lake. We would put our boat in the water at my friend Guy’s cottage, one of the oldest residences on the lake. His late father Sylvio had owned the property for over sixty-five years and was one of the first cottages on this side of the lake. He had spent almost every day of his life there, working around the house fixing things, exercising on his rings, and going for six kilometer runs around the lake eery morning. The first time meeting Sylvio was entirely by chance. It was late December during a blizzard when my outboard suddenly ceased, forcing me to paddle in crazy winds to the closest shoreline with a dock. It was his. Our car was parked several miles away and he was kind enough to give me a ride back down the road to the public ramp. During the drive he mentioned that his son also fished the lake but his boat was temporarily out of service, waiting for a gasket valve replacement. This sounded a lot like the mechanical problem my friend was having with his boat and I turned to ask him if his son’s name was Guy. He looked at me wide-eyed and nodded his head. Guy Bissonnette? He nodded and we had a good laugh as he drove me back to my car. Of all the places for me to land ashore it somehow seemed that it was destiny that brought me to his dock. 

The lake was flat, mirror calm, reflecting the somber grey sky. There was not another boat on the lake.  A pair of black ducks  flew across the sky. We slid the zodiac across the newly fallen snow, lifted it gingerly over the dock and plopped it into the water. While letting out my fly line missed a good fish that shook its head a few times and was gone before the hook could be set. It didn’t feel like a laker or a brown, the mainstay fish in this lake, more like a rainbow. A few moments later and we were fighting our second fish, a small brown trout that splashed on the surface. The fish were active, perhaps aware that  the end of the world was near and wanted to go out on full bellies. From the bow of the boat Mark cast the shoreline with a spinner and caught several nice rainbow trout, exceptionally rare for this lake, although a few years back one of Guy’s friends hit a six-pounder in November.

At around noon, precisely twelve minutes before the scheduled end of time, we opened up a bottle of Mirrassou white wine, an excellent vintage to accompany cataclysmic events, ate the sushi leftovers from the night before, and waited for the end of the world.  As we got drunk, we talked at great length about the roadmap of our lives, our profound regrets, the poor life choices we had made, both professional and personal, our successes and failures, agreeing that in the end the only important thing in life other than family and friends, or at least not less important than anything else, was fishing. The fish seemed to agree as well and kept hitting our flies the rest of the day. The Mayans had apparently forgot to tell them it was the end of the world.

Have a great post-apocalypse. 

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.

On several occasions, it has fallen upon me to lay several rods to rest and each time it has proved difficult, realizing that like an old and trusted childhood friend that had recently passed, it could never be replaced by any newer model. There was a comfort, a mutual trust, a history built over the years, a confidence in each other that couldn’t be replaced by a quick over the counter purchase. 

The first broken rod was a steelhead rod, a ten foot GLX noodle rod that despite my ineptitude, always managed to find a sweet spot in those wild rainbows of the Niagara River and somehow managed to control their attempts to return to Lake Ontario. Its parabolic bend, like a ballet dancer or a gymnast in full stretch, was a combination of both grace and power, strength and flexibility through the marriage of physics and space age composite materials, which possessed a life of its own. With properties capable of detecting the minutest strike, light as a feather yet strong enough to tame a tyee salmon, it had been in my comany for decades and was a most trusted companion.  Ironically, its demise came about not as a result of a fish but basically of human stupidity, probably the root cause of all rod mortality. Without elaborating on the details, suffice to say that fishing in a small creek with a rod a few feet longer than the creek is wide is not recommended.  So my ten foot wand gets circumcised six inches off the top, and although still somewhat functional owing to a surgical tip replacement, the feng shue of its anime has been thrown off kilter and the damn thing never felt right since that fateful day. But I stubbornly refused to discard it, or even redeem the lifetime guarantee because in the intervening decades since my original purchase, the company had been bought out and  no longer manufactured the same product anymore – only a reasonable facsimile, now outsourced to China, that they deemed to be an equivalent model. Besides, when I finally relented and called their customer service department, the polite lady at the other end of the line, unaware of the magnitude of my personal loss, instructed me to break the rod into eight inch pieces to facilitate transport.

“Excuse me – you want me to what?” I responded mortified at the thought. Breaking it once unintentionally had mortified me – now they expected me to break it into another twelve pieces? The mere thought of doing so reminded me of a gangland style disposal of incriminating evidence, hacking off appendages with a chainsaw to facilitate disposal.

“You mean, you want me to break it more?”

The thought of causing more damage to my trusted rod seemed morally untenable, as reprehensible as the desecration of a dead body.  Who knew what fate awaited it back at the factory, if it would be melted down and recycled into another rod to serve again or would just end up in a garbage bin. After much deliberation my decision was to keep it close to me, where it enjoys the honor and respect so rightfully deserved through decades of dedicated service, now holding a permanent resting place in my office where every so often I can pick her up and reminisce as I run my fingers over her still smooth and strong blank. She is the Eva Peron of my fishing rods.

The second rod laid to rest was a fly rod given to me by my father.  He had bought it from his friend, a fly tier of some renown who also tinkered with building rods and needed some Guinea pigs to test out his new products.  Paul was a great fisherman and he put so much of himself into his rods, as he did with his flies, that the sum of its components was always greater than its constituent parts. The rod had a spirit and life of its own, only satisfied when bent into a large arc. It was a nine foot eight weight, which basically meant that in my unconventional world of fly-fishing, it would serve well for everything from bluegill to barracuda. Thousands of fish were beaten up on that rod, from the inland lakes of Northern Quebec, mostly fishing for large pike, to the backcountry of the Everglades fishing for small tarpon.  This rod taught me how to cast and fight fish, rewarding me richly when the secrets of its properties were learned.  But everything has its limitations, particularly graphite, and sometimes envelopes are pushed too far. Such was the case several years ago, wading for ghostlike bones and permit in the Keys, flinging beaded Crazy Charlies in the stiff winds. The heavy fly kept whacking my rod on the forecast, possibly creating a hairline stress fracture along the graphite blank for on the next hookup, the rod bent and snapped as the bone headed for Cuba.  It was a clean break, midway between the handle and the ferrule.  It was a long walk across the flats back to shore. The rod was a complete write-off. A thousand miles away from home, having soldiered so valiantly for decades, it deserved a better fate than its unceremonious disposal in the dumpster behind the Bayside seafood restaurant. The only reminder I have of this rod, other than fond memories of course, is the cork butt extension that sits new on a library shelf, as I never once got around to using it. But the rod ended its existence doing what it was made to do and fulfilling its ultimate purpose,  which at least made its exit a little more tolerable, although I still harbor suspicions that my poor casting and those heavy Crazy Charlies had something to do with it as well.  Perhaps the worst fate of any rod, like that of any man, is to lack purpose and remain unused to gather dust in some corner, until they die of old age.

The last loss was perhaps the most intolerable and tragic, as unacceptable as the life of someone whose youthful promise was suddenly snatched away by the angel of death before their time.  It was an unnecessary end, the result of both inattention and a ravenous fish. While there are no statistics compiled to bear truth to the following statement, as most victims are too probably embarrassed to come forward, there is strong reason to suspect that many rods have also suffered a similar fate.  It’s the type of thing that is actually funny in a slapstick sort of way, blooper funny, but like a pie in the face or slipping on the ice, usually when it happens to somebody else. We had been hanging around forever, me and Senor IMX, a feathery one piece, six-foot fast action meat stick that was equally comfortably horsing out intransigent bass from thick cover as  breaking the will of fifty pound sturgeon in open water. Its hook setting power was infallible and once hooked, the fish was almost always landed. The first time using this rod on the Ottawa River, I hooked over sixty bass and only lost one.  It was a magical wand. For years we traipsed across the countryside searching for large fish and it was always equal to the challenge, and very versatile no matter what was thrown its way – Muskies in Georgian Bay, steelhead in Superior, bass in Quetico. We did it all.

Our history came to an end several weeks ago while fishing for musky, those crazy, enigmatic creatures of a thousand casts.  I was twitching sucker minnows off a deep weed line when suddenly feeling the irrepressible call of nature. The action had been steady all morning and the fish were hot, landing one and losing another with a few curious follows in between. I laid the rod across the tubes of the inflatable boat, the minnow still seductively dangling a few inches under the water, and turn to do my business. The next second my partner yells out “fish on.”  Because I didn’t have a rod in my hand, it only seemed logical to assume that the fish was on his rod, until when turning to see the commotion and peeing all over the boat in the process, was instead horrified to catch a final glimpse of the butt end of my rod, now several feet beneath the clear water  trailered by an angry musky disappearing at light speed down into the depths of the lake. It was like a hit-and-run accident. There wasn’t enough time for either of us to react and besides, the water was too cold to go overboard after it. It was an expensive sacrifice to the fish gods. While we tried snagging it off the bottom but to no avail. While the location of its watery grave has been marked in the g.p.s. of my mind, there still remains a faint glimmer of hope that one day we might still be re-united gain.  In my mind, perhaps as somewhat of a consolation to my unwillingness to let it go, that rod is not considered dead quite yet, just in limbo, comatose, missing in action, or a P.O.W.

And in the end, usually because we have no other choice, as the clock never turns back and the past can never be fully reclaimed, and because our lives continue despite all suffering through all conceivable categories of loss, both personal and material, we do eventualy wind up making new friends and replacing our old rods. But it is never the quite the same again, which I suppose in the long run, is really the way all things are meant to be.

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.  

One of my favorite culverts is located up North in the Laurentians mountains where my childhood friend Marco had an uncle who owned a summer cottage somewhere on a large lake near L’Annonciation. We spent many countless summer days exploring the surrounding countryside, fishing creeks and their headwater lakes in the mountains, undertaking many futile prospecting expeditions that required  arduous portages with either canoe or inflatable boat in our relentless pursuit of brook trout. We were young and eager and followed the time-tested catechism of brook trout fishing which, simply stated, was that if the water was not easily accessible and didn’t involve suffering of biblical proportions, plagued by black flies and mosquitoes and  tenuous treks through muskeg and swamps and involving a degree of physical agony theretofore only suffered by the early Voyagers who were the first to discover this country – it was not worth trying to get to.  For brook trout only lived in the wildest and most beautiful places, away from civilization and people, and conditions needed to be exactly right for them to survive. But despite our immature fits of trout induced sadomasochism, which saw us driving down every dirt road we came across in our attempt to discover new frontiers and the promise of undiscovered waters, we also happened to stumble upon the unlikely fact that sometimes the shortest path to trout was often the one of least resistance that virtually lay right at the side of the road, in the undistinguished form of a culvert.

It was a hot summer day and we were hopelessly lost, as usual, short on gas yet high on hopes, and we had pulled over to the shoulder of the road to study a map and assess our relative position vis-a-vis the nearest trout lake holding suicidal fish. Off to the side of the gravel road, coming from the middle of nowhere, through the thick brush and bramble and warble of songbirds in the trees, we overheard the hush of a slight trickle, faint yet certain, almost as if somebody had left a faucet running in the kitchen. At first, we thought our minds were playing tricks on us but a closer inspection of our surroundings revealed that there was indeed a trickle running through the ditch on the other side of the road. Not large enough by any standard to be confused with a creek or brook, but much smaller, perhaps best described as a rill; for it was merely a three-foot wide swath of shallow water that barely cascaded a few inches over some pebbles and stones for about fifty feet before suddenly disappearing under the road. We crossed over to the other side, scaled its muddy bank, and suddenly descended into a magical world of darkness where it was cool and humid, musty with the smell of wet earth and shaded from all sunlight by the massive maple and oak trees that stood guard. A thick carpet of moss carpeted the forest floor and tall rhododendrons and ferns rose luridly from the humid earth. We were immediately drawn to the faint sound of water. A small corrugated steel pipe of around three feet in diameter jutted out from the bank like a broken tap and spilled its contents into a small and well-rounded pool of crystal clear water. The basin that had formed beneath, eroded by countless years of run-off water, was a few feet deep and the size of a bathtub that barely had enough overflow to trickle through the large boulders stationed at its tail out, into another nanocreek that trickled into a lake further below. But more incredibly, a few large shadows flitted about the pool, sending us scurrying back to the truck for our rods.  On the first cast the water erupted and we soon hoisted a huge brookie from the basin. It was close to fourteen inches, a gleaming bar of orange across its ivory belly, speckled with lilac and red spots along its flanks and a vermiculated olive markings along its back, creek camouflage from overhead predators.  It was a huge fish for this size creek, despite its small size compared to its brethren in lakes or larger rivers, fully matured in every physical way, including the small kype indicating it was a male and the fine white lines on the caudal fins, maybe a six year old fish. We marvelled at the brilliance of its colors as it flopped around on the wet ground. We decided it would make an excellent supper and tossed it in our creel, continuing to fish the basin and getting a fish on every cast, until we finally limited out at ten apiece. It had taken us less than fifteen minutes to fill our quota for the day with the added bonus that and there was no suffering involved and we would not go to bed hungry.

This secret culvert became our go to place whenever we got skunked elsewhere and really wanted to eat fresh trout for supper. For years we continued to fish this place and it always produced the same miraculous results. It became known as the trout tub. No matter what changes were occurring to the surrounding landscape, the trout tub below the culvert remained a guarded secret and very few people even knew of its existence, although many drove right over it.  As we grew older we lost touch with each other and rarely visited our secret creek. It became an afterthought, often when found travelling alone through the area coming home from more distant waters. But curiosity and the bet of a sure thing always got the best of me, and every so often would take the side road off the highway to go check in on my little creek and say hello to the trout and see if all was still well in their world.  If they were there, and they always were, it was a reassurance that nature was still holding her own, as their existence was the best barometer of the creeks overall health.

It had been over a decade since my last visit to the creek until recently, when both schedule and circumstances allowed me to roam across the places of my youth, still hopelessly in search of trout, or rather, the beautiful ideal of what they represented in my mind, a perfect fish that lived only the wildest of places yet to be touched by the hand of man. But change, so relentless and constant in its sometimes blind march towards progress, had finally reached my little creek. The gravel road whose dusty passage led to the foothills had now been gussied up in a dark suit of asphalt that was both ill-fitted and looked slightly out-of-place, like a man in a cheap tuxedo attending a country fair. A few designer homes had sprouted up like weeds along the roadside, a sure sign the neighborhood was going to hell. It was surreal, disheartening, and maddening. There was also a brand new no parking sign posted next to the road. How dare they?

With heavy heart, braced for bad news, taking a deep breath like the kind you take when the police or a doctor calls in the middle of the night, I stumbled down the bank to survey the inevitable damage  left by the road work. Surprisingly, the trees had been spared and still stood their ground, their voluminous branches continuing to shelter the area from sunlight. The original steel pipe had been replaced by another, the new one slightly wider but the basin below its trickle still remained intact as somehow the workers, perhaps through conscientious design, managed to delicately work around it and avoided allowing earth to fill in the hole. Everything looked exactly the same as it always did, except that the precipitous rocky bank along the road had been tarred and covered by some sort of geotextile to prevent further erosion. The first cast into the dark basin produced one of the most beautiful trout I had ever seen. Its colors were so perfect, so vivid, a vibrant work of living art that wriggled between my fingers. But it was more than that. It represented a victory for mother nature, however small and slippery its form. Like a proverbial canary in the coal mine, its simple existence proved that all was still well in my secret trout tub, that its waters still flowed cold and clear from atop the surrounding mountains, undisturbed by developement, and that change had not yet discovered my secret corner of paradise.

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.

Speaking of which, my dog Lucas, a small bichon frise with a Doberman sized attitude who by default recognizes me as his master, has not adapted well to his new surroundings. On our first day, when returning to my truck to retrieve a forgotten bag, he waited for the door to open and jumped into the front and refused to come out. He simply was not coming out and stubbornly decided to wait until I drove him back home. For over an hour we had a mexican stand-off, glaring at each other through a car window, both of us waiting for some concessionary action. Finally, and only by way of extortion by cheese, usually a game ending choice when negotiating with stubborn dogs, he ceded his position and came back into the cottage. Then in a gesture to secure the homestead as his own, he summarily pooped at the top of the stairwell.

Nor has my recent interaction with local wildlife been successful. On the first night we were visited by a family of free-loading raccons that decided to become squatters in the garbage bin. Somehow, like refugees or stowaways on a ship, they all managed to get inside the tiny confines of the bin where they immediately began to eat their way through its contents. They are smart animals and a solid kick to the plastic bin served nicely as an eviction notice that sent them scurrying across the road and into the forest. The biggest one of them, presumably the mother of all the others, waddled lazily across the road, fattened by a life of leftovers of foie gras and brie. Truly an epicurean racoon that would surely return nightly to sate its gastronomical  cravings. She has returned every night since, the opening of the bin and rustling of plastic bags breaking the nighttime silence. A rock tossed in its general direction usually does the trick most on days of the week , but not nearly enough to deter them on Wednesday nights when all the garbage is put out for pick-up the following morning. These critters have an internal time clock, a calendar that tells them when Wednesday rolls around as they show up with a sense of purpose and gusto that is only realized early next morning walking the dog, when remnants of their Bacchanalian feasts lay scattered over the gravel road leading up the mountainside. They also have the habit of leaving poop on my garbage bins, perhaps their attempt to mark it as their property.

But if the raccoons reign the forest during the night, the scourge of the daytime are most certainly the hyperactive chipmunks; or at least two sociopathic rodents in particular that have come to be known as Chip & Dale, both of whom could use a strong dose of Ritalin. From their perch high above the pine and maple trees surrounding us, they rule over everything with an iron tight paw. At first our presence disturbed their serenity and they chatted madly as they conspired for hours to have us vacate the premises on grounds of noise pollution. But they soon realized that their new neighbors provided new opportunities, quickly discovering that outdoor meals meant crumbs for them everywhere. A routine was quickly established. We had coffee and ate our breakfast on the porch and when entering inside to clean the dishes, the duo jumped onto the balcony and quickly gnawed on everything that had fallen from our plates. One of them, after ingesting a chocolate covered cashew, which is basically crack for chipmunks, kept watch on the balcony chatting madly and pacing back and forth until one was tossed in its direction. In return for my daily hospitality, he pooped all over the balcony, presumably marking his space. We left the door open one day and found him gnawing on a sesame bagel in the kitchen when we returned. Chased with a broom from the house, he ran up the nearest tree where he came out onto a branch at eye level and began to vent his frustrations. We all have our problems.

On the second week, when my wife returned to work in the city, it was time for me to roam around and do some serious fishing. The catch-22 was that there were very few lakes remaining that had any type of public access, and those that did were usually poor lakes. Most of the lakes that we had fished decades ago were now private and restricted to non-owners. Almost all the lakes were posted, forcing me to use the Park system. My first outing was in Tremblant National Park, entering the southernmost entrance in the Pimbina sector near St-Donat. It cost me six dollars to access the roads and another twenty-five to secure daily fishing rights on one of their lakes. Lac Gaston is located in the Northeastern territory of the park, the Assomption sector, which although lies only thirty-eight kilometers away from the gate, it is a good hour-long drive down the winding gravel road. The last few miles, through a rutted road that is half-washed awayby spring flooding, with fallen trees blocking its path in two places, took me close to thirty minutes. It is a beautiful head lake, crystal clear waters, with bleached deadfalls surrounding the entire lake. It is a typical brook trout lake. A loon cackled in the bay before diving,  its call echoing hauntingly through the hills.

It seemed a day to troll streamer flies, at least until there were some rises on the lake. Several passes around the lake and down through its center yielded nothing. The water was warmer than normal but there was no excuse for failure. This is a big lake, surely not fished out. SEPAQ, the government organization that operates the park system, does not stock any of these lakes and closes them for the season once their quota is reached. It is a pretty well-managed system if catch reports and limits, based on an honor system, are not abused by fishermen. Hours later, still without a strike or any sign of activity, I continued to ply the waters maniacally using almost every trout tactic known to man. Yet perseverance does not always guarantee that one catches fish. Most of the time it does but not on this particular day. In the dead calm heat of the afternoon, with temperatures soaring above ninety degrees, I retreated to my truck for a quick siesta, falling fell asleep in cab to the irritating buzz of a nasty deerfly doing  recon missions around my head and awakened from my slumber an hour or so later to the crackling sound of radio static, belonging to a walkie-talkie strapped to the side of a game warden that had come to pay me a visit.

He came to see, quite hopefully, if there had been any fish caught. He didn’t seem surprised when given the activity report. He sighed, remarking that the girl at the gate had not chosen a good lake, although when he first started working in the park twenty-five years earlier, it had been one of its best lakes. It was in high demand, probably overfished through the years, and then fished out and forgotten about. He did mention, perhaps to ignite some encouragement, that somebody had in fact caught a big one last year. This didn’t make me feel any better, although it did feel like one of those lakes that only held big fish. Hopefully in the evening there would be some hatches.

That night there was more of nothing – not a strike, rise, splash, sniff, or sign of life other than the loons that seemed to laugh at the futility of my actions. When had brook trout become so difficult? The long drive back through the dark gave me plenty of time to think about the day. It hurt to fill out the catch report, checking the box on the bottom that contained a no-catch result, and depositing it in the box at the gate on my way out. The trout had been intransigent. But at least they hadn’t pooped on my porch.

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.  To his credit, he had stated unequivocally that there would be muskies in the newly formed basin, adjacent to the weedline where he had seen one a few days earlier while wading off the point. It had swam in perfect view right next to him. The water was almost to shallow for the inflatable. We lifted the engine and drifted over the giant weed mat with the wind. Some carp spooked from the weeds leaving clouds of mud behind. A dead walleye, close to ten pounds, bobbed in the weeds. It was impossible to determine whether it had died after spawning or simply of natural causes, like old age as it did not look as though it had been sick. There was little probability that it was a post-release mortality, for such a monstrous walleye would never be released in this part of the country, where very few local anglers practiced catch & release -  hook ’n cook was their mantra.

We spotted the first fish just as we reached the deep water on the outside edge of the weed line. It was a fifty inch fish and bolted at the sight of the overhead inflatable. Mark turned to me with a familiar smirk and   ”told you so” look on his face. He felt validated in the accuracy of his prognostication. It seemed only fitting that a few moments later, a large fin emerged from the weeds, like a shark, and inhaled his bait. The fish went wild, tailwalking across the water and taking several nice runs before allowing herself to be ushered boatside. She was a large fish, with incredible spotted patterns, almost like a tiger musky and her upper jaw was gruesomely deformed, the result of some trauma suffered in youth that had since completely healed over. Most likely the fish had been captured by a negligent fisherman who in an effort to retrieve his lure, managed to rip off part of its upper mandible. Despite the handicap, the fish had survived to full maturity and showed all signs of being an extremely healthy specimen. We beached the boat on a small rock island and took a few quick photos before releasing the fish into the clear water. It was a good start to the day.

There was a series of rapids above the island, inaccessible by boat yet not by foot and we waded upstream. The rapids were loaded with bass and we quickly caught several dozen on flies before wandering further upstream, dragging rods, cameras, and a bucket full of minnows in tow. On the way, we both fell in the water twice as we negotiated our way across the slick algae covered stones that made up the riverbed. It was a veritable comedy of errors, a blooper reel of highlights but thankfully there weren’t any cameras rolling. Above the third set of rapids, nestled between the slate rocks was a smooth rock basin carved out by eons of cascading water that had dug a deep trench in the rocks. This pool turned out to carry the mother lode, holding almost every specimen of fish representative of this ecosystem. There were gar, smallmouth, pike, musky, channel cats, and quite possibly, both trout and sturgeon in this pool. We tossed some minnows in and within seconds the floats submerged and we had a double header of acrobatic five-pound bass. For the next hour, until we depleted all our minnows, the action was non-stop and most of the fish were all between four and five pounds. They were all large post-spawn females and would feed voraciously in the river for a few weeks before returning to the lake. These were the same fish we had encountered a month earlier just as they were entering the system. Since our first meeting they had entered the river, moved all the way up into the back bays, paired with a partner and spawned in the shallow flats, then deserted their beds for the males to guard as they moved upriver in search of massive schools of minnows to gorge upon and replenish their energy. Once the minnows ran out, we fly fished with leech imitation patterns, and while not as effective as the minnows, nonetheless managed to deceive a few bass, including a huge twenty-three inch fish that hit like a freight train.

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. There were some real giants in here, fish that would easily go over thirty pounds. It always amazed me how very few people in this country bother to fish for them, although the sport is gaining in popularity and has legions of devoted fans, particularly across the Big Pond in the United Kingdom, where most fish over twenty pounds have been caught several times, have a known history, and even sport a nickname.  One man’s garbage is always another one’s treasure. I am always amazed by the story of the common carp and how it was able to establish itself in virtually every corner of the country. What is even more mind-boggling is that all these carp finning about at my feet, including all the carp everywhere else in North America, are the original descendants of  only six carp imported by a Californian farmer in the late 1800′s to use as fertilizer and pig feed. But the carp, who incidentally are really damn smart, had other ideas and escaped and quickly established themselves across the entire continent.

The gar, on the other hand, while just as vilified and misunderstood, also considered a trash fish, is not an invasive species and had been around for about 290 million year before monkeys descended from the treetops and evolved into men. The gar, owing to its menacing appearance, the stuff of horror flicks and phantasmagorial nightmares, is extremely misunderstood. Once in a while I will come across  a dead carcass on shore, left intentionally to die by some other fisherman, usually in an advanced state of decomposition, and the ignorance of the act tends to really anger me, which really isn’t a good thing when one mostly fishes to relax. There are only two things that will frustrate me on water – unneccessary killing of the resource and pollution. It is all about respect, for both the fish and the environment first, which to me should always be the underlying ethos for all who enjoy the outdoors.  All fish are both worthy and deserving of our respect, no matter where we place them on the hierarchy of sportfish. 

Despite their being around for three million years, they had largely disappeared from the flats. It was incredible how the temperatures and winds had turned them off and sent them scampering into deeper water for cover. In an effort to keep myself busy, managed to hook into several carp but lost all of them before it got interesting. In retrospect, losing them was a bit of a blessing in disguise, a subconscious time-management technique, for when you get a good hook into some of these beasts, don’t expect to take any calls or appointments for at least a good half hour. What usually winds up happening is that when you are tied into them, the gar tend to suddenly appear all around you, almost mocking you as they realize you are not really in a position to deal with them. One of the hooked carp, entertaining illusions of being a salmon, jumped three times before spitting the fly. If anything, this brief exercise seemed to awaken the gar from their lethargy and ambivalence as soon after a few were spotted cruising into the shallows. My first fish, sight cast from just a few feet away, was a nice female that was loaded with eggs which began spitting out from her belly as we lifted her from the water and took a few photos. My waders were covered with sticky and gelatinous white eggs, unlike the roe of most fish, eggs that are extremely toxic to all mammals, including humans.  Don’t confuse the eggs of a gar for caviar or you will definitely wind up in a hospital, or worse yet, a cemetery.

Despite the lack of fish, it was still pleasant, as are most days spent on water, away from the world of responsibility and the drudgery of most work.  For a long time, as I sat on a rock and ate my lunch, simultaneously watching Mark casting across the bay, watching a pod of carp that swam a few feet from shore,  a flock of seagulls that hovered like kites above the river, and reflected on the many years we had returned here and how much things had changed over the decades. Every year the conditions were slightly different and we had never had two seasons that were exactly the same. If anything, one of the lessons this place teaches you is that change is constant and a part of everything around us. Nothing ever remains the same. 

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. They will follow her every movement, submissively trailing a few inches behind or underneath, often rubbing their scaly bodies together in a strange mating ritual that predates man. This was always a good sign as the competitive instinct of the gar fully kicks in when several of them are present in a group. Casting to a single cruising gar does not always guarantee a strike while casting to a pod of them almost certainly does. For some reason, it always seems that during this time the males display interesting feeding behavior patterns, very gentlemanly as they always seem to allow the female to feed first, which is usually why you catch the biggest fish in the pod immediately.

What I truly enjoy about this type of fishing is that it has elements of  hunting, of stalking your prey, sight-fishing for the veritable leopard of the flats. When fishing for gar I generally don’t like wasting my time casting to what can’t be seen. Experience has taught me that the best approach is to find an area with cruisers and park yourself in stealth mode, keep your eyes peeled on the water, with twenty feet of line curled at your feet at the ready for a quick cast. Some of my biggest fish have been caught literally at my feet, with only a few feet of line out. A quick roll cast or dapple, as we are fond of calling  it, and the dirty deed is done. The flies used for gar are basic streamer patterns with one slight modification, an additional stinger hook attached with surflon or spectra. Single hooks rarely penetrate the hard, toothy,  and narrow mandible of the gar. A small treble usually works quite effectively and the landing ratio with this fly stands around fifty percent – quite respectable given the nature of the beast.

As I approached the water there were three dark forms lying up against a rock in two inches of water. My first cast fell a few feet short and on the retrieve the fly was hammered by a smallmouth bass that created such a commotion in the skinny water that the gar were spooked and shot like arrows from the back of the bay as I watched helplessly while dealing with the intransigent bass. This was not how it was intended to go down. A few small gar were milling around the bay but not the singular fish desired, the object of our quest, the big female we saw last year that broke off my fly, a fish well in excess of fifty inches. A log with teeth over one-third of its body length. A modern-day dinosaur.  Wading in a foot of water a stealthy approach is paramount. Keep it simple and slow, move two steps forward, stop,  and scan the water around you. Look  for shadows in the clear water , or listen for a sign of them gulping air, or keep an eye out for fish crashing minnows on the surface.  Wait a minute or so and then move on until a fish is spotted. By mid-morning I had disappointingly spotted only six gar, managed to cast to three of them, and landed two. But as the water warmed more fish entered the system and began to congregate in small packs.  For the longest while I remained as motionless as a stone statue in twelve inches of water, both focused on the task at hand yet daydreaming at the same time, and waited for the gar to cruise by. Every minute or so one would travel within casting range, the fly sent sailing in a direction intended to intersect its course, and a fish was on. It was really that easy. In the hours that followed we both hooked over twenty gar, a few bass, and a giant carp that was tail-hooked and almost ran out all my backing as it headed back towards the lake.  While most people consider carp to be a trash fish, their reputation is undeserved for their qualities as a sport fish cannot be denied.

On the other side of the dam there were even more fish milling about in the shallows. The first fish, spotted lying just a few inches from the shoreline, was a nice female that somersaulted twice from the water and took a few short yet blistering runs before being led onto the rocks. The colours were incredible, green and golden scales as tough as iron, with beautiful black markings. No matter what type of response the aesthetics of a gar elicits from most people, nobody can deny that it is not a beautiful fish despite its fearsome appearance.  The rest of the afternoon was a blur of activity, casting and landing fish every few minutes, changing flies, re-tying knots and leaders, pulling flies from our shirts, and taking photos. As the day neared its end, having caught and landed several more gar, although not the object of our desire, we walked through the park towards the car fully satisfied with our results. It was our best day to date for gar on the rocks.

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. Or maybe it is a function of laziness, or ultimately preference, which is to fish and not to write, which is always difficult.  At any rate not much other than the photo page has been updated on the site since February, when global warming reared its welcomed head and sprang an early eason upon us, a gift for having endured another cold winter.  Other than fish, I haven’t done much, changed a few lightbulbs, oiled some tables, unplugged a few toilets, read a few books, spent countless hours in the company of my children. It has been both an interesting yet difficult period, for a variety of reasons, owing largely to my belief that it is important for a man to wake up with a purpose each day, other than to catch a big fish, which although not any less important than anything else, should not be a man’s only ambition in life. 

Unless of course they pay you good money to do it. 

The second reason for the lack of updates is the following. The internet,while opening a portal to the world of like minded individuals, for the most part well intentioned, good people, it is also the final frontier of ignorance, fraud, scam, spam, plagiarism, copywright theft and any other digital vice that can be conceived. It is truly the Wild West, the final frontier without any governance .Every day the spammers leave hundreds of impertinent comments (trackbacks) in my moderation box that serve no other purpose than to monetize my traffic and make it east for you to buy more of what they are trying to sell, which in large part has nothing even to do with fishing related products. Not even backlinks to fishing related companies. Bad internet. It also really pisses me off when I find something I have written displayed on another site without consent, worse still when the text has been modified, making me sound like an illiterate mountain man from Arkansas. No matter what type of software you use to protect your content, the spammers and hackers and content thieves are always one step ahead and have enough time to do their damage. You are left with a choice: don’t write anything significant as it will immediately get hijacked onto a hundred other sites. This is a pity as there are preciously few dedicated sites remaining out there that exist solely for the purpose of offering a quality product for free consumption. Since its inception this site has always been about sharing the finest images and stories, dedicated to entertaining anglers, without any ulterior motives. It is all a labour of love, a work of passion. Until now, the blog has taken the form of short fiction depicting some of my adventures. This will not change but the format will take the form of a diary or fishing journal, chronicling the events of the day or maybe even random thoughts about the fishing life. The tone will be less literary, the entries will be shorter, and hopefully it will prove to be just as interesting and insightful.

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.

There is just something so entirely unappealing about the prospect of sitting over a six inch hole in the cold waiting for baitfish like perch or crappies to bite. Some of my friends spend their weekends on the ice chasing perch and walleye, spending thousands of dollars on equipment to go out and catch fish that can basically be bought at the fish market for $1.49 per pound, without having to drill a hole in the two foot thick ice or freezing in the process. I know, I know, that’s not the point, it’s not about the fish, and there are great benefits on any day spent outdoors with friends and family, even freezing on a sheet of ice. When people learn that I’m not a big fan of ice fishing they actually seem quite surprised, often questioning a second time to make sure they heard correctly.  It’s not that I don’t like fishing, for I will fish open water in any kinds of foul weather, preferably at the other extreme of the temperature spectrum, but rather that I hate the cold. My aversion to the cold dates back to childhood, when I was five or six years old and my parents sent me outdoors to play in the snow. That wasn’t really a problem except that, for my own protection, they tethered me to a dog leash attached to the handle of  the garage door, just out of range of any point of independant entry back into the house, and often forgetting me outside in the freezing cold for hours. In today’s enlightened world, most parents would be reported to youth protective services for committing such an act but back in the sixties it was not uncommon to torture your children and was perfectly acceptable, and an entire generation of presently well adjusted baby boomers had all been subjected to similar forms of parental rearing, a la Dr. Spock gone wild. I once shared with a filippino friend, terrified by the imminent prospect of his first winter, that I too hated the cold. He looked at me with a strange look in his eyes and replied, b-b-b-but you were born here. Just because I was born here doesn’t mean I like winter, eh?  As my body ages, so does my proportional aversion to the cold. As winter’s icy embrace is at its peak, I become increasingly envious of the bear’s ability to hibernate for the entire winter, putting itself into a state of suspended animation, missing the worst weather this country has to offer.

The first time I ice fished was in the early seventies, when the only equipment available to the ice fisherman was a hand auger and some ice fishing rods. Most of the tip-ups were all hand-made. There was not much else to the sport, no electronics, clams, portable heaters, or any of the creature comforts that are the mainstay of todays modern ice fisherman. We  were out on the Bay of Quinte in Southern Ontario, on a vast windswept bay more suited for kite skiing than ice fishing. The exercise seemed somewhat futile, for there was so much water to cover it seemed absurd to be fishing from ten or twelve random holes in the ice, covering a total of about five square feet of water. My friend explained that we would wait for the fish to come under our holes, with the best bite occuring around sunset, another eight numbing hours away.  The temperature was minus 20 and the winds gusted relentlessly all day, the wind chill factor dropping the temperature to minus 30. At one point my boots actually froze to the ice, leaving me under the distinct impression that I would remain stuck there until the spring thaw. It was so cold that the snot froze and hung from your nostrils, likes icicles from the eaves of a rooftop. We caught three fish that day, suffered mild frostbite to our feet,fingers, and faces, and needed to have our car boosted when we reached shore. It was not a fun day.

It seems that alcohol can often be an integral part of the activity, and this would seem to make some sense to me, for at the very least one can always rest assured that the beer will always be served cold. Besides, a frozen lake is a great place to go on a bender for how much damage can one do to themselves (or to the fish) while drunk out on the ice? So while alcohol may be an inducement to some as another great excuse to get drunk, I don’t drink enough for this enticement to sway my feelings about the sport. Two beers and I’m done, again, something truly un-Canadian! Besides, for some strange reason I hate exposing myself in minus 20 weather, as my genitalia tend to withdraw and not re-emerge until the spring solstice, but maybe thats just me. While my friends attempt to convince me that ice fishing the greatest cure for cabin fever, I find it somehow ironic that they this miraculous tonic for winter sees them spending a day in a cabin on the ice, and a cold one at that.  Why would I trade my warm house for a cold cabin? Don’t get me wrong, or write me any hate letters, as I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for those hardy souls willing to brave the worst elements to practice their sport. Winter is long and brutal in this country, particularly if you live up in Northern Sakatchewan or Manitoba, where quite frankly, what the hell else is there to do in the winter but ice fish? One of my friends, both extrmely resourceful and lazy, equally averse to the cold, cut a few holes in the floor of his camper and fishes all winter out on Lake of the Woods from the comfort of his living room while watching television in his underwear on his sofa. He is my ice fishing hero…