THE
REEL THING September
1998
Well
we are back in the gym to begin our fifteenth season of casting, fly tying,
rod building, movies, guests, fish stories and generally all round great fun! Those of you who missed our opening night last week may
regret it as we already have eight people booked for our fall trout and salmon
trip to Southampton and the Saugeen River for Friday, October 16th.
Actually we have ten, but the first eight to get $16.00 in to us for
the cottage will be going on this one. If
there are four more ready to put down their $16.00, then we may be able to
book an extra cottage…….each fully-equipped cottage has two bedrooms with
two double beds and about five minutes from the river so we can get an early
start on the fishing without having to get up in the middle of the night.
Jim Lloyd and I went up last Saturday to check it out and it looks like
our timing is perfect. Jim caught
a lovely eight pound fresh-run silver chinnook and I ‘released’ a nice
rainbow in a couple of hours of fishing and saw a number of others hooked,
caught and lost. We also picked a
couple of feeds of wild mushrooms for the second week in a row. If any of our members who have not participated in a mushroom
hunt with us before would like to partake of this rewarding and delicious
hobby, get back to me in the next week or so and I will arrange a little fall
fungus foray. No need to
worry…….I can pick 21 species safely (Sheila knows 7) and this is a
pastime that cannot be treated casually.
We stick to the most common, most readily identifiable and best eating
of the lot.
Just
after getting back from our trip to Northern Quebec and the Broadback River,
Jim and I gave the mouth of the Bighead River and Georgian Bay a brief workout
and hooked and lost an enormous rainbow when, believe it or not, the split
ring straightened out on my lure. The
straightened fastener was still tied to the line but the powerful trout took
off with my Crocodile.
Good
news: Len Connelly has given us
the go-ahead to use his shop for the bamboo rod building.
We will be beginning this activity in a week or so as soon as we
determine how many folks would like to take part this year and build a split
cane rod of their own. It appears
that it will be on Tuesday evenings. Please
let Jim, Mike, Len or me know as S.A.P. if you are interested and we will give
you the details.
·
Great to see Adam Rightmyer back in action with the club!
He has completed his apprenticeship and is now a qualified electrician
with Guild Electric. Congratulations,
Adam!
·
Now if we can only get Ashok, Craig, Jon, Paul Q, and a few of
our other absentees out to share the pleasures of our club with the rest of
us, we will be in fine shape.
The
Thursday evening venue for our meetings should increase participation we are
told as a number of folks put us on the self occasionally in order to watch
the Wednesday night hockey games. Hey
all you upland and duck hunters……don’t forget your fly tying buddies.
We need grouse, pheasant, duck and goose goodies.
I
know you’re all sitting on pins and needles wondering if we managed to
finally break the world record for speckled trout (14 ¼ lbs) on the Broadback
trip a few weeks ago. No. But it was the most successful trip since the early
‘eighties’ with ten or eleven mounties, brookies over 20”, caught, eaten
or released. Many others were
also caught with almost half of the total catch taken on flies, Despairs and
Muscarovitches. The largest fish
were in the 26” 6 to 7 pound category.
Paul Kennedy, Roger Cannon and I shared top honours, but Leon Schwartz
was right behind with several gorgeous trout to his credit.
One
of the highlights was the fact that everybody managed to catch trout on flies
tied right in camp. Roger tied
his first trout fly ever (a Despair, of course) and went out and caught seven
or eight specks on it the next day. Roger
also figured in another highlight.
The
first night on the river while I was cooking supper, Paul hooked and landed a
20 incher right behind the kitchen area and Coleman stove, then shortly
thereafter, Roger appeared from the other side of the tent with a grin a yard
wide and trembling from the top of his fishing hat to the toes of his chest
waders. He was carrying another
21 incher and had an incredible story to tell.
In
case you don’t already know, Roger is the President of Normark Canada (Rapalas
and so on) and has the world record musky, caught on a Rapala, of course,
hanging in the reception area of his headquarters in Oshawa.
I believe that fish weighed 63 lbs and is around five feet long, or
thereabouts.
He
held up his trout for us all to see and the fish looked like it had been
through the war or something. It
seems that shortly after he hooked the trout on a Vibrax spinner some 70 or 80
feet off shore, it stopped fighting and simply came in as he reeled. That is until it got a few feet in front of him when he
realized that a monster pike had grabbed the four and a half pound trout and
not even aware of Roger’s presence merely swam towards him while chomping on
his trophy trout. Finally a
tug-of-war ensued, with the pike eventually releasing its ‘catch’. Roger swears the huge fish just lay there for a moment or two
glaring at him before casually swimming away.
The brook trout was deeply scarred on one side and raked from head to
tail on the other, but the kicker in the story is what Mr. Cannon (a gentleman
who unlike me tends to underestimate rather than overestimate his catches) had
to say about the size of the pike, “It’s
hard to believe, Gord, but that thing was almost as big, maybe even bigger,
than the musky in our office!”
WOW!
This was the fish that Paul Quarrington has been pursuing all these
years and wrote numerous books and magazine articles about.
Too bad, Q! Maybe next
year….it’ll be even bigger. All
you have to do is catch a 4 or 5 pound trout and use it for bait with a shark
hook or something!
All
in all that was one Hell of a trip, with enough fish stories and pictures to
boot, to last us all winter in the club.
Maybe the Saugeen trip will produce some excitement for us all as well.
This is the last day of summer so if you want to get into some fine
late season trout fishing in the next couple of weeks, browns, brookies or
‘bows, give Rick Matusiak, Jim, Len or me a call and we’ll put you on to
the hot spots.
We
are still waiting for Leon & Ashok to finalize the reciprocal trip we were
invited on with the Pensacola, Florida Fly Fishers Association. Come on fellows……this could be a real winner for us.
Why not shoot for late November or early December?
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