Our Cup Runneth Over

Because of my highly successful recovery from Myrmecophobia (fear of ants), I was very excited when Mike called last Friday to suggest re-visiting that local tributary I told you about in my previous post. We set Saturday morning as the date of "destruction." With only marginal rain in the overnight forecast, we were sure of great success.

We got to the river early, before first light, and as the day began to brighten we could see more and more clearly the conditions with which we were cursed; it turns out that Saturday was a very wet date. Very wet and chocolatey-milky, unfortunately. The water was so brown that it was white, in some spots, and I think the only way for the salmon to get around was if they had had the use of periscopes. Some of the storm clouds, which were supposed to have shed only the merest breath of a drizzle of a shaking dog, had had ideas of their own. Namely, I've been fishing long enough to know that the river'd be blown; the rain had been that bad at times, on Friday night. Sigh.

To make matters worse, my time was at a premium on this particular morning. I wanted to get back home by 10am, so I could do some yard work; something about increasing the equity in my share of Laura's good graces, and the back lawn was looking pretty scraggly. I mean, it was a jungle back there! Not that it's so bad to have to do yard work. It's just that when your buddy decides to high-tail it to another river, further east, you can't really keep your honour and high-tail it with him. Especially, when even your own little internal voice is saying "man, that grass looks BAD!"

So Mike managed to salvage his day, by obtaining success elsewhere. I decided to continue my research on float-fishing rivermouths & headed out to the very end of the pier, out into the lake, looking for adequate seams to "sew." However, there was nothing for me but the exclamation point on the mini-disaster that my morning fishing trip had turned into: carp jumping out in the lake. Warm water, not cold.

There are two things of note, otherwise, that I can jot down here. First, in the dark, I did manage to "line" something. If you're not familiar with the term "lining" or "to line fish," it generally refers to the practise of snagging, but is usually done in the mouth. It's called "lining" because the passing fish will get the line caught in its mouth & usually all it takes, then, is a hookset to get the fish on. Anyway, this fish I lined was caught above the float, and it snapped the line once the float had reached the swivel & could no longer glide down any further. Admittedly, this is not very agile, when you're drifting, and my only excuse is that it was still dark at the time & I could not see how much slack I had let out. Mike managed to save the float for me by casting at it repeatedly & hooking into the leader beneath it. Thanks bud!

The second thing of note, and the thankful end to this rather ineffectual blog entry: whether you fish or not, take a walk along Lake Ontario's shore if you can make time for it, in the fall. Scenes like this, and this await you.

Oh yeah. The afternoon was dry enough that I did take care of that back yard. It looks nice, now!

p.-

Ants in my Pants

As I patiently await October and the first timid upstream forays of my beloved steelhead, I've temporarily turned once again to chinook salmon to cure the "itch." So last Saturday night, I decided to spend a couple of hours in an estuary east of Oshawa, floating marshmallows for "boots."

I have to apologise to Joe Ahmad for diverging in so diametrical a fashion from his latest post, because "lobbing marshmallows" although widely subscribed to as a viable method for catching Chinooks is nothing more than a low-probability exercise in "lining." I can hear all my steelhead buddies laughing at me already, especially because I hear that their outings have all surpassed my own, but to be honest I didn't feel like fighting for a spot on a pier; or going anywhere that would be so busy that one could read fine print by the light of all the glow sticks & glow spoons being whizzed about. I just wanted my own quiet little spot, by a quiet river, quietly on a quiet night...okay?

As it turned out, though, the spot was not as quiet as I had hoped. Several anglers had already had the same notion as I had, and they were hunkered down in most of the best spots. One fellow even had a motion-sensing Coleman lantern, which I thought was a pretty nifty item, and he confirmed for me (alas) that things were pretty slow in this section of the river.

Maybe I'm beating to death the "father of twins" thing; but when you've sufficiently mastered the art of simultaneoulsy (and acrobatically) feeding two babies their formula, fruit & cereal, after bathing them one at a time, while keeping them occupied with a mobile, or baby mozart or whatever, to reward your wife with a well deserved night out (i.e. two against one): there are things about which you just ain't gonna be fussy. Anyway, when the steelhead roll in, "super dad" will see his fussy-o-meter go up. But for Lake Ontario "boots" I won't sweat it. At this point, my fishing motto is "just happy to be here."

Let me describe the rest of the evening, then. I managed, by dint of stomping and crash-banging the tall grass (in the dark), to find a suitable spot from whence to lob my salmony marshy mallows. Upstream from me was a group of silent, jogging-suit adorned locals, silent as tombstones, and downstream from me, with rods like glowing toxic cat-tails, was a pod of verbose russians. I deduced that they were russians by the quick, rapid repetition of "da" whenever somebody's marshmallow encountered the open maw of a passing salmon. Which invariably led to tangles of tolstoyan proportions, seeing as they were all sitting much too close to eachother. The salmon, bless them, have no idea that we call them "boots" and so they remain powerful and, when hooked, frenzied. So, in their frenzy, they tend to ignore the fact that the line that happens to be hooked to them also happens to be entangling itself with all the other lines in the vicinity as they fight; nor, I think, do they care that they are subsequently providing a canadian the opportunity to listen to what must have been some very colourful russian invective.

That night, all the salmon were successful in these attempts to be free. I didn't see a single one landed. Many were hooked, but none of them appeared to think the marshmallows so palatable as to beg for more on shore. "Could yuh help poor salmon with a bituva marshmalluh, eh?"

The ants however, must have thought that they had hit paydirt ... and how. As it turns out, in my anti-social attempt to claim my very own riverfront property, I had stomped my way to Lilliput, as it were. And the little people were all in a tizzy, deciding how best to subdue me. Such a big meal, I must have seemed, that at least the entire kitchen staff of the Queen, as well as some her presonal retinue, was sent to fetch tasty bits of my self to her highness's table. Of course, intent on salmon, and smoking a cigar (for which it was a perfect night, still and damp - I made lots of really nice smoke rings ... JB, it was a monte cristo #3), I thought merely, as I kicked and scratched and rubbed, "what the? ... these mosquito bites really burn !"

I only discovered the culprits of my discomfort when, having arrived at home, I shook all the dying ones out of my pants and into the toilet. I flushed them all of course, because that's not the sort of thing you really want to be bragging about bringing home; a bunch of pants ants. Oops! and that's what I just blogged. Doh!

Maybe "next time" eh?

p.-

The Sky is Falling!

I hate to say it, but... actually I love to say "I told you so." Sorry!

Last weekend was supposed to be warm and sunny, both days, in southern Ontario. Instead, our cars got a pretty decent wash.

When I was pier fishing, I remember that there was a lot of pessimism among my local interlocutors with regards to the weather: "long range forecast isn't calling for rain for the next two weeks." In salmonid fishing circles, this is bad news because it means river flows won't be high enough or cool enough to entice fish closer or into streams.

But I had read an article in Ontario out of Doors , years and years ago (so I have no idea in which issue it was, or who wrote it) about watching clouds to predict rainfall; and I could have sworn, as I sat listening to that rant about blue Prince Crafts, that a weather change for the "better" was on the way. I had been watching the clouds, and it seemed to me that rain was definitely the forecast. But I'm not the weather channel, so I shut up about it at the time. And yet as it turned out, I was right. Good for me. Here's a cookie, me! Yay!

It's quite simple: if you see cirrus clouds, really high whispy & almost diaphanous clouds, a weather change is imminent. This is because cirrus clouds are moving in ahead of a front. Now, a front can be good or bad, but if the cirrus clouds are followed by altocumulus clouds (see photo caption above), it usually means rain is on the way. I found more confirmation of this at the Physical Geography.net website, along with other formation combinations that lead to precipitation. It's actually a neat site that explains a lot more about cloud formations, as well as air masses, with links to definitions for most of the cryptic scientific terms it uses.

This is not to say that we should never trust the weather people. It's just more proof that independent observation often yields a truer outlook than anything offered by large associations, and it's always a good idea to keep your own wits about you!

p.-

1/2 Day Cashed In

Laura and the twins are spending time with their Grammy and Auntie Colleen, this week, so technically I'm a free man. And since I still had a half day left on my father's day gift, and feeling rather "squeezed" - or maybe it was just missing the activity of tossing a line out - I decided to go pier fishing for chinook salmon last night.

The eternal curse of the occasional fisherman is invariably uttered thus: "you should have been here yesterday" or "the fishing was great all last week." My blessings are elsewhere these days, so I just tip my cap down and keep casting; to not much avail as it turned out last night!

Nonetheless, it was time spent fishing, for which I was deducted nothing more than an evening spent on calm, dark Lake Ontario. The lake was "turning over" which added to the general despondence felt by most of the fishermen on the pier. It means the salmon move out, beyond the reach of our casts, to more comfortably cool waters. Although two had been caught early, with mating colours already quite dark, that would be all we would see for the night.

As if to make things worse, and as a consequence of the lake's shifting, my side of the pier suddenly accumulated quite a mess of algae. What I had orignially taken for the promising boil of a surfacing chinook was, in fact, the bubbling up of large clumps of weeds, created by the wave and current action of the lake against the pier. It did not let up. As this made fishing unpleasant, if not impossible, and as I didn't wish to muscle in on anyone else on the other side, I broke out a cigar, snapped open a can of Warsteiner, and started chatting with one of the locals.

Our conversation covered everything from the fish I missed out on last week, to the bottom structure of the waters around the pier; from fish stocking in the great lakes to stories about poachers in the area & arrests that were made. Ironically, I also learned about the rudeness of "frenchmen" who come to the area to fish from their "sea of blue Prince Crafts." Apparently these rude people will follow too closely behind other trolling fishermen, scaring the fish. I say "Ironic," because I am a francophone, although without the unfortunate drawback of owning a Prince Craft. Tabarnak. But I didn't take offense, because I've experienced this very thing with Mike, in a place where the operator of the blue Prince Craft was definitely francophone. Coincidence, n'est-ce pas?

Also, I learned something quite useful that I didn't know before, related to tossing glow-in-the-dark spoons from piers at night. Always carry a camera flash. Used properly, it "recharges" the glow of your spoon in a fraction of a second, and it will not affect your night sight. Finally, always bring these two senses: humour and awe. The humour I hope was covered already, but of awe: how the lake looks at night, under an overcast sky with nothing solid on which to attach your peripheral vision; you no longer feel your feet, but are floating over the somnambulating waves, like a night bird edging off to flight.

Anyway, I no longer feel squeezed (or stressed)!

p.-

Loons & bass

So, for Father's day I got a one-day surcease from the foolish promise I made last May, and I chose to use it not on Steelhead, but on bass fishing in a small lake in the Kawarthas.

I was lucky enough to be accompanied by Laura's brother in-law, Steve, and we headed out early Sunday morning, before the twins could wake us up. Unfortunately, we had to be efficient, as Steve had a deadline to make. So as "luck" would have it, the results weren't great.

Other than three or four little bass, nothing serious was landed; although a fair sized largemouth bass (3lbs or so) chose to rest in the shade of my float tube for a few minutes, after deciding that the texas rig it had followed wasn't so appetising after all. It disappeared when, shortly after the wind rose, I had to kick to right myself.

The loons, however, were something else. The picture I have posted here is, unfortunately, not recent. I am forced to appreciate the irony whereby, for this fisherman, this was an opportunity where a camera would have been far more useful a tool, than a blind fishing rod. Quite truly, the lake on which Steve and I found ourselves fishing, was nothing less than an aerodrome for loons.

I didn't count them, but at one time there were at least 9 of them in one quadrant of the lake. There was lots of gesticulating going on, wing-skipping, taking off and landing; as well as it seems diving and fishing. Twice, a loon came close enough that I could have tossed a lure at it with high expectations of hitting it; and one of those times, the bird came so close that I might have touched it with my outstretched rod-tip, if I had tried (or had had the time).

No wonder the bass weren't biting. They were on the lam!

Compliments and Blessings

I recently got a very nice compliment from Joe Ahmad @ www.steelhead-diaries.com , which you can find as a comment on my 2006 Trout Opener blog. He also relates that I'm lucky to have had the chance to spend so much time, recently, fishing with "papa." It's not as though we spent all our time catching fish! On the contrary, as the picture above shows, the fellow under the hat, and amid the jetsam of a lunch stop, is the old man catching a much needed forty winks instead... But Joe's comments started me on a meditation over the events of the last five or six month of my own life, and on the tremendous changes that have occurred which have brought some affirming and sometimes earth-shattering realisations.

On December 28th, at roughly 11am, I was sitting at my desk. I wasn't really working, but talking to Mike, when my second line started to flash. The voice that came over the line was my wife's; "my water just broke!" By 11:30pm that evening, Isaac & Samuel were born.

Never in my most delerious moments had the thought ever attempted to cross my mind, that it would be possible for me to feel that Ferraris going 0 to 60 in 6 seconds (or whatever) would seem unimpressive. Dull. Whoop-dee-doo. But I know better, now. Life itself accelerates from 0 to the speed of absolute chaos, in a fraction of the fraction of a split second. As I held my twin boys, fraternal and therefore completely different from one another; proud father, elated and scared as hell, I dimly realised that I had just gone through such an acceleration in Life.

Only the parents of multiples know or can truly understand how the next 3 months would unfold. I can honestly say that I have never before experienced such emotional tumult, nor so much love, nor pride, nor fear, confusion, anger and great, great joy. And yet, in all of this daily chaos and struggle to keep up, there was always a relative involved, staying up late with us or for us, making breakfast, lunch, dinner, cleaning the kitchen, holding one of the babies or bathing him, changing diapers and on and on; and sometimes one of those relatives was my own father.

His caring and his involvement in our new life, as parents, moved me. When you have children of your own, turn back & look at your parents. You see them as children, once, and parents, as they were and are for you, and grandparents now; and you see yourself, as you will also someday be. And if you look down at the little bundle in your arms; suddenly, you no longer merely know that time is a limited commodity for us all, but you can feel it. You can feel it like the icy hand of a creditor on your shoulder, and yet it affirms life and the importance of "now." "Now is the time." "Today is the day" ; every day.

So, I go fishing with my dad, while I still can.

I greet my boys joyfully every morning before I head out to work, and I greet them equally happily when I get back home.

I try as hard as I can to express my appreciation of the incredible heroism of my wife, Laura, and even try to get ahead of her & figure out before hand those little tasks she needs done that will make her life easier.

I hold Samuel til he falls asleep, snap pictures of Laura playing with Isaac and participate, as my father taught me to, in as many aspects of my childrens' lives as I can.

I even promised not to go fishing until next fall. Let's see. Now, that was nice of me, wasn't it!!!

p.-

2006 Trout Opener

Predictably, this year's opener was rather slow. A warm winter & early thaw contributed to the steelhead beating a hasty retreat to Lake Ontario & Lake Erie. Low and clear waters, bearing only the palest remaining tinge of last week's rains, did not help much either.

However, some stretches of the rivers I fished did make for surprisingly good fishing, providing among others the spawned-out male in the caption, above. I also managed a pair of wild brown trout, which is always a big bonus in southern ontario. Furthermore, I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a doe and her fawn.

But, best of all on most days I was joined by my father (his first opener), some of my steelheading buddies (Mike & Andrew), my brother in-law, Richard, his brother, John, and his "Schöne," Inge. The highlight of the opening weekend, therefore, was only indirectly related to fishing: a camping style fish-fry by the banks of one of my favourite tributaries. We sat in the shade of newly unfurled leaves, savouring the rare treat of the freshest, butter-fried trout possible. I don't usually like eating fish, but with Mike as the cook, it's a no-miss proposition! He turns it into candy every time.

Close on the list of highlights was the final day of fishing. It was only my father and I, and he managed all the fish! It was a great honour to "teach back" to the man who first instilled the love of angling in me. He's still not used to long steelhead rods & is only starting to get the hang of rigging the float, spacing shot etc... but he catches on quickly. Watching him fight and land a lovely spawned-out hen, pushing 10 lbs, was truly joyous.

So that settles it, again: the sport of angling is not all about catching fish. To be sure, the trout themselves are a precious (in my opinion priceless) resource. But whether one fishes alone or with others, a communion occurs whose blessings and rewards are only partially attributable to the fish or the fishing. There are no words to label it, which is good; only the secure knowledge of time well spent, out of a bank that proves, in the end, far too poor.

p.-