Heading North

 COVID has changed even the simplest of things.  Like the annual guys’ fishing trip to Canada.  What’s simpler than going fishing?   Assemble the group, get the deposits, book a cabin on a lake, buy food, check your equipment, pack up and go, right? 

Wrong.  Last summer, pre-vaccine, the border never opened.  Gary Robinson broke a 30-year string of planning and enjoying group trips to Canada.  He thought the same thing might happen this year, but the Canadian government opened the border on August 9^th.  He quickly put a plan together and we crossed on August 27. But that crossing was completely different.

Most of us remember a time when you could cross into Canada by simply showing your American driver’s license.  9/11 changed all that.  Passports have been mandatory for twenty years, but this year brought several new wrinkles.

The ArriveCan computer app for starters.  It’s like pre-registering to enter Canada combined with providing health information.  The guys in the group helped each other figure it out by multi-texting on our smartphones.  We scanned the strip on our passport, provided photos of our vaccine card, a crossing date, emergency contact information, where we would stay, where we would quarantine if necessary.  Not easy but then again not hard if you have rudimentary computer skills.

Key to the process was proof of a negative COVID test within 72 hours of crossing into Canada.  We all took the drive-through test at Walgreens on the same day and crossed our fingers.  All good.  We took off the next day in two vehicles, one towing a trailer with all our gear.

It was a long trip, 15 hours, but shorter than previous years.  We’ve been driving to Red Lake, Ontario, and flying north onto Job Lake in a bush plane equipped with pontoons.  Job Lake is inaccessible by road and has just one cabin on the lake.  For that reason, the fishing is wonderful, and the privacy is exquisite.  No phone or internet capability.  We are connected to our camp owner by a satellite phone only used for emergencies.

Typically, we drive to International Falls, Minnesota the first night and cross the border into Fort Frances, Ontario the next morning.  But sleeping off eight more hours of our ticking 72-hour COVID test clock spooked us.  We booked a room in Fort Frances knowing we’d feel better when we successfully made it into Canada.  We crossed at 6:00 p.m.

The border official was friendly.  We produced actual passports, vaccine cards, and written copies of our COVID tests, all of which she looked at carefully.  I have a hunch all that information was already on her computer screen, but she checked it anyway and passed us through.  As U.S. citizens, we take our ability to travel freely throughout the world so lightly.  It’s a huge privilege, having access to nearly every nation on the planet, and not just our neighbors to the North.

It’s hard to say what was different about Fort Frances, Ontario after two years had passed.  Like all border towns, the community’s economy is based on those crossing back and forth.  There was a new and nifty cannabis shop so close to the border I think I could have hit a golf ball onto U.S. soil using a sand wedge.  It was busy.  But the town, in general, was not.  The local economy looked to be hard hit by the border closure.

At the Super 8 motel, the counter staff seemed to have been waiting for us.  I think they were smiling but we never saw their mouths.  Staff were strictly masked all the time. Canadians take preventative health measures more seriously than us.  The lobby was largely empty to prevent groups from gathering.  In the dining room, chairs were upside down on the tables and there was no breakfast service.  Brown paper bags were promised for the morning.    

We celebrated our escape from the U.S. that night at a beer and pizza joint close to the motel.  We encountered a long wait for service, not due to a crush of hungry diners, but because tables inside were shut down to provide safe distance between diners.  Our server seemed new.  Could be Canada is experiencing the same slow return to full employment as us.

Typically, the next morning before leaving for the trip into the Northwoods we would stop for one last prized provision.  Our group does serious bacon business in Canada.  You can still get butcher shop bacon up there wrapped in that thick brown waxed paper.  We buy ten pounds for the trip, and some guys buy more to bring home on the way out.  We used to buy it in Red Lake but lost that connection.  Thankfully, we found Einar’s, a tiny convenience store in Fort Frances with a butcher and wonderful thick Canadian bacon.   

I don’t know why bacon is better in Canada, but it is.  Einar slices our bacon from a freshly cured pork belly.  We’ve seen him do it in the store.   Oscar Mayer is no match for Einar’s bacon.  One of our first lunches on the lake is BLT’s with homegrown Illinois tomatoes and Einar’s bacon, and it's built into almost every breakfast.

Trouble was, we had crossed late Friday night and Einar is closed on weekends.  Gary phoned Einar prior to leaving and he promised to bring the bacon to the Super 8 so it was there for us Saturday morning.  It was.  I think Einar needed the business.    

The economics of the resort business changed our trip.  At its best, Northern Ontario’s fishing season is short.  It opens in mid-May and closes in early September.  Fly-in fishing is more expensive, and resorts that provide it face greater costs.  Contracting with pilots, gearing up planes, arranging for a season that could start no sooner than August 9^th, which gave them no more than five or six weeks of bookings, just didn’t add up.  We couldn’t find a fly-in option, to our regular lake or any other.  We were grounded.

So we chose big Lake Wabaskang, three hours North of the border and right around the corner from Perrault Falls.   In past years we would meet lots of southbound U.S. vehicles towing boats heading home on Saturday having finished their trips.  This year, traffic in both directions was light.

At Perrault Falls we turned off the road to Red Lake and followed a gravel trail 50 yards to a small parking lot on a lake.  It was the far south shore of Lake Wabaskang.  Dave, the owner of Peffley’s resort, pulled up shortly after we arrived in an old 21’ fiberglass speed boat with a big Yamaha outboard.  Most of the seats had been pulled out.  We loaded our gear into it.    

“I can only take half of you, so we’re going to have to make two trips.  The lake is really low.  If I put on too much weight, I can’t make it over the rocks in the shallows.  Besides that, I’m waiting on two more guys from Indiana.  They got stuck on the border.  The rest of their group got here yesterday.”     

Our group was headed to the north end of Lake Wabaskang, which covers 15,000 acres and has 105 miles of shoreline. We let the younger guys go ahead so they could get a head start unloading the gear.  I was selected for the second trip.  The boat pulled out and left us on the dock.  Occasionally you could hear a vehicle on the road.  Seemed odd to hear traffic on the lake we were going to fish. 

While we waited the guys from Indiana showed up. They carried a few bags and boxes from their car to the dock and we began to talk.

“Heard you had some trouble at the border.”

“I guess you could call it trouble, yeah.  Big damned confusing mess is what it was.  We didn’t think they were going to let us in.”

“What happened?”

“They said the information on that Canadian computer app didn’t match up with our papers.  Made us pull out of line and re-do it.  Gave us a Wi-Fi code and a password.  I don’t know shit about Wi-Fi.  I tried to tell ‘em that.” 

The other guy chimed in.

“A young guy in a car in line saw what was going on and came over to help us.  Started punching stuff into Jerry’s cell phone.   Got to some point and asked us what our email addresses were.  I knew mine but Jerry didn’t know his.”

Jerry threw up his hands and looked defeated.

“My wife does all that internet stuff.  I don’t pay any attention to it.  She told me I was all set.”

The digital age can be cruel to old guys who checked out of it long ago.  Jerry’s friend picked up the story.

“He don’t know his wife’s number.  So anyway, we got back in line and tried to explain our problem, but they weren’t having it and sent us back to the American side until we got it figured out.”

Jerry hung his head and his friend continued. 

“We lost a day.  My COVID test ran more than 72 hours but thankfully they took my temperature and stuff and didn’t make me take another one.  It was a mess.  But we’re here now.”

“Yep.  And it’s a nice day.”

We heard a boat in the distance.  Soon we were on the way to the fishing camp.  Jerry and his friend from Indiana were long-time acquaintances of Dave.  They hadn’t seen each other for two years and caught up during the trip.

At one point, when Dave throttled down and was scraping rocks in a narrow channel, Jerry inquired about one of their friends who had arrived in camp the day before.

“How many times has Bob fallen down?”

Dave laughed.

“None that I know, but he stumbled clear across the kitchen the other night when we came to visit.  He pulled on the door to let us in, it stuck, he let go of the knob, started pedaling backward, and couldn’t catch himself.  And it’s taking him a long time to get to and from the dock.”

The average age of your typical American fisherman in Canada is not going down.

We arrived at the opposite end of the lake where a cluster of a dozen or more buildings was built on a high rock bluff overlooking the lake. Peffley’s Wilderness Camp has a small protected cove with good solid docks.  Parked in the slips are more than a dozen nice 14’ aluminum fishing boats with new Yamaha electric start 20 hp motors.

Dave tied up on the dock and drove a four-wheeler with a two-wheel trailer down to the lake.  We loaded our stuff onto it to haul to the cabin.  Actually two cabins.  One slept six and a tiny one close by slept two.  Gary and his son took the tiny place.  It sat at a strange angle.

So did the bigger cabin.  If you dropped something off the kitchen table, it rolled clear to the door.   We made up for a lack of electrical outlets with extension cords.  The asphalt shingles were curling up on the roof.  The cabins need a lot of work.

Electricity at Peffley’s is powered by two Diesel generators.  Dave has another fiberglass boat equipped with a 100-gallon tank he uses to haul fuel across the lake to keep the lights on.  He takes good care of the place, cleaning the fishing boats and filling the gas tanks each day.  He makes sure minnows are brought in for bait.  He keeps the fish house, where fish are cleaned and filleted, clean and tidy.  We weren’t used to the comforts, running toilets, a fish house, someone to tend to the boats. 

Many operators of remote camps have invested in solar panels and battery systems on their cabins which provide electricity for the fishermen and pump water to the cabin.  Once those systems are in place, the cost to maintain them can be negligible.  I wondered to myself what it cost Dave to fill that big diesel tank and to keep the generators going for a season. 

Dave lives in Indiana in the off-season.  He bought the camp 16 years ago from its previous owner after fishing it summer after summer.  He’s in his mid-60’s I’d say.  He and his wife are going it alone this summer.

“We shortened the week by a day because we just can’t get one set of guests out, another in, and clean the cabins all on a Saturday.”

“So, usually you have help?”

“Yeah.  We bring in a couple in the middle of May and they stay all summer.  We provide housing of course and much of their food.  We’ve had good luck with Newfies.  The last Newfie couple we had worked six summers straight.”

“Newfies?”

“Canadians from Newfoundland.  Don’t ask me why they work in Ontario so far from home, but it works for them.  Nice people, hardworking.  But you can’t attract those kinds of workers for a five-week season.”

Gary’s booking was last minute.  He had brought a group there many years ago and called Dave on the chance he had an opening.  Many fishing camps on lakes in high demand are typically fully booked for years.  Not so during the pandemic.

“We were damned glad to get your call,” Dave told Gary.  “Sort of put the cap on this sliver of a summer’s business.”

Dave’s wife brought dessert over to our cabin twice, and Dave shared some ceviche he made from Walleye.  We reciprocated by mixing them cocktails.  They’re nice people.

“I thought maybe with the Americans unable to cross the border that Canadians would take up the slack and book the weeks the Americans didn’t use.”

“Nope,” Dave replied.  “It’s not like that.  I think upwards of 85% of the camps are run by guys like me, Americans who visited these lakes, dreamed of owning a resort, and found a way.  And our guests, I’d say 95% of all the fishermen, are American.  Canadians can nearly always find good fishing close to home.  They don’t need to rent boats and cabins for a week.  When the Americans couldn’t come, the resort business crashed.  If it wasn’t for some government help, we’d be out of business by now.”

“Used to be it was all word of mouth.  Most of my guests are from Indiana.  They tell people back home about the place and I get a ton of repeat business.  Most have kept their same weeks for years.  But it’s changing.  What we really need is younger fishermen, and we haven’t gotten them yet.”

We were surprised Dave was able to purchase the camp outright. The more remote fly-in lakes allow only long-term leases for outfitters.  Lake Wabaskang had other private parcels of land tucked here and there, though we saw little activity at their docks.  The other boats we encountered on the lake seemed to all be from Dave’s resort.

Despite the differences with our fly-in lake, Lake Wabaskang had plenty of similarities.  The one I yearned for the most was the quiet.

I consider it quiet in the shack but if I listen closely, I hear vehicles on Route 80, the overhead fan, planes from Skydive Chicago, any number of background noises we hear in our communities but typically filter out.  But on the north end of that giant lake, on flat water ringed by trees and away from towns, deep calm silence wraps around you like a blanket. 

 And on clear nights, the absence of ambient light makes the sky come completely alive; the bright highway of stars that makes up the Milky Way, the constellations.  There are smartphone apps now that you can use to point out the sky.  They outline the constellation you are looking at on the little screen, bringing it to life.

That’s another feature of Dave’s camp.  For the entire trip, we were rarely if ever shut out of an internet connection.  I stayed away from my phone as much as possible, using it mainly as a camera, and tried to ignore my friends who were talking about breaking news.  I was looking forward to being off the grid entirely. Different year, different trip. 

But no matter what men build around those big Canadian lakes some things remain constant.  Lake Wabaskang is a great fishery.  It has depth and variety, good flow in at its shallow north end and out the south at Perrault Falls.  It produces primarily Northern and Walleye Pike, many of them big and healthy.  We made the trip to fish, to be in the company of good friends, and experience the beauty of the Canadian Shield.  Mission accomplished.

Thanks to Gary Robinson for making the trip happen again this year under difficult circumstances, and for thirty years before that.  He has provided a great experience for many of us for a long time.  Give that man a fish.