Fishing in the Wilderness

Face Book sends me pictures from my past.  During late August in one (it’s a blur) of the pandemic years a photo I posted years before took me, in a rush, back to a jewel of a lake I’d fished with friends during the same late August week years ago in Canada.  I stared at the image on my phone and wondered if I would ever be there again. For two years all fly in fishing to remote lakes out of Red Lake, Ontario was cancelled. 

And then it was 2022 and we were back.  After a day’s drive to the border and another to the outfitter’s dock, eight passengers lifted off the water aboard a refurbished Otter seaplane, rose into a sun filled blue sky, and landed on Job Lake by the one and only cabin on its shore which would be our home for the next seven days.

Photo by Nathan Robinson

We stay busy on day one unloading the plane, carrying gear up to the cabin, unpacking, getting out the fishing equipment, and finally heading out onto the lake, two to a boat, in early afternoon.  It becomes real when we reach our fishing spots, tip our jigs with a piece of worm, and drop a line in the water, intent on catching that night’s dinner.

The boat driver cuts the motor.  As conversation wanes, the quiet hits.  You think it’s quiet at home, in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep, early in the morning when no one else is up.  But listen closely and there is always something.  A train somewhere, an appliance running, the buzz of a fluorescent light, traffic in the background, maybe a plane.  But up north in the wilderness, quiet takes on new meaning.

Especially on a day with little wind.  The water lies flat and the absence of noise wraps around you like a old quilt.  It’s deeply relaxing.  Astonishing silence happens over and over each day until the sound of the plane coming to take you home is heard in the distance.  I forget from year to year.  And when I remember, I say a small prayer of gratitude for being lucky enough to experience such beauty.

The wilderness lake and the land around it are not frozen in time.  It changes.  Much of the land is actually rock.  We’re amazed that substantial pine trees can grow and thrive with such shallow roots at the water’s edge and beyond.  Fire struck some of the forest around Job Lake and created stark differences from what we remember.  Trees burned up and fell, lichen and other growth was stripped from the rock which changed its color from green to pink.  Charred logs laid at all angles while new seedlings sprouted among them. 

Our first night we compared notes as to where the damage was greatest.  One favorite spot, which we had named “the wall” was nearly unrecognizable.  With little apparent pattern, some islands in the lake burned while others rods away from charred islands remain untouched.  We tried to imagine the day or night the fire struck, and the calamity caused to the wildlife, all without human witness, with the next day dawning as always.  We realize that nature operates on a time frames detached from humans.  In thirty years, after most of the fisherman on our trip are no longer living, all evidence of that fire will be gone.  Forgotten.

We noticed other changes.  We experienced mosquitoes for the first time in memory.  Waiting till late in the season usually brought chilly nights and the absence of insects.  We think it’s getting warmer.  Both the water and the air. 

But the fish seem to have thrived. Two years of no fishing pressure from humans produced fatter, bigger walleye.  We fish on Canada’s conservation license, which demands that all walleye under 15 inches and over 18 inches be released.  Think of walleye under 15 inches as children and over 18 inches as adult breeding stock.  We are allowed to eat the adolescents.  Some days they were hard to find.  Too many big ones.  What a wonderful problem!

Canada allows a daily limit of two walleye per person under this license, which works out to four per boat or sixteen each day for our four boats.  We can’t eat sixteen fish a day.  So, we keep twelve, three to a boat, for eating and release all the rest so they might live and grow and keep Job Lake a productive lake far into the future.

We’re eating walleye in more ways than ever.  In years past we fried them all.  With a little creativity and grizzled fishermen expanding their palates, we’ve taken to baking them and basting them in lemon/butter/caper sauce, making walleye ceviche, and this year for the first time chopping uneaten cooked filets into walleye salad akin to tuna salad.  It’s a feast up there.  Healthy wild caught fish from pristine water eaten fresh each day.  Hard to duplicate.

Laid over it all, this trip was about renewing friendships.  We were separated from each other for so long by COVID.  As we paired up in the boats, switching partners each day, we found ourselves checking in and catching up.

We talked a lot about family and community, sparing each other for the most part from politics.  We’re shut out from the internet on Job Lake, although cellular phone service has nearly reached its shore   I for one appreciate the respite.  I used my phone as a camera, and occasionally compulsively hit my Face Book icon.  Nothing changed.  And In truth, when I did log in after getting back onto WI Fi going south, nothing changed.

Change is relative up north.  The effects of the pandemic and the resulting economy on wilderness outfitters is perilous.  You would think two years with no fisherman would have been an ideal chance to make improvements to our cabin.  Sadly, the cabin is in worse shape than ever.  The bears returned, and although they didn’t bother us in August, they were hell for the fishermen in June.  That cabin was built in the late 50’s.  It won’t last forever.  And forever may be approaching soon.

Though life offers no guarantees I hope to be back next year.  If I do, I’ll give you a report again.  I don’t go back and compare this fishing blog to previous years, but I can’t imagine one is markedly different than another.  It’s a wonderful trip, made better by very good people.  I consider myself lucky to be part of it.