A big Fish

I belong to the 7 Oaks Game and Fish Association in Winnipeg. We have a newsletter ‘Campfire Chatter’. It’s a wonderful newsletter, mainly because my son is the editor. It gave me an opportunity to write a few articles, of which two have been published so far.

I started a column called ‘Memories on the Wall’. Here is the first article I wrote. I thought the readers of my new blog may enjoy it.

There is a sixteen-pound Northern Pike hanging in our sunroom. It needs to be dusted once in awhile to remove the spider webs and restore the shiny colors. It has been hanging there for only a few years. Before that it graced one of the walls in our cottage at Louise Lake in Ontario. Sixteen pounds may not sound like much to some anglers, but it is the largest fish I ever caught. I still remember the day I caught it like it was yesterday, even though over twenty years have gone by since then.

I was busy doing some work at the cottage. It was August 1^st, 1990. I decided to take some time off and go fishing over the lunch hour. It was hot and muggy and I didn’t really expect to catch anything, but I needed to have a rest.

I took out the canoe and paddled about a hundred feet into the lake and let the canoe drift slowly along the weedy shore. It must have been on the second or third cast when I hooked into something. At first I thought I was stuck in the weeds or on a large log, because when I began reeling in there was only passive resistance. I didn’t want to loose my new bait, a black jig with a three-inch white and gray rubber fish. I was using a twelve-pound test line on an open-faced Shimano 300 reel.

Why a twelve pound line? Well, I have to turn the clock back about two weeks. My two sons and I were fishing one evening for walleye, perch, crappies, and bullheads (we used to smoke them). We caught mostly perch and a few walleye using worms. When we ran out of worms we cut up the perch and used them for bait. Suddenly we were hooking larger fish but could never even get them to the surface, because they just broke the six and eight pound lines we were using.

The next day, my son and I marched over to the local bait and tackle store to buy twenty-pound test line. Yes, we meant business. The salesman gave us this odd look and asked if we were going after whales. When we told him we were after big jacks (Northern Pike) he recommended a twelve-pound line. Since my old reel wasn’t good enough anymore I also bought a new reel.

Anyway, I slowly reeled in the large log I assumed to have on the other end when it suddenly exploded onto the surface. And now the battle began. I knew I had something big.

In the meantime my sons were looking out of the window to see how I was doing. “It looks like Dad is in trouble,” they told my wife, “his canoe is going all over the place.” So all three of them came running to check out what my problem was. When I saw them, I yelled, “Bring the boat and a large net.” I only had a small net with me and worried whatever I had on the hook wouldn’t fit into it. By this time I had brought the fish near the boat and it looked huge. When I dipped the net into the water sheer luck made the Pike curl right into it.

I scooped it out of the water and into the boat. The bait fell out of the Pike’s mouth and I realized how lucky I had been. Now, before this I had never caught anything larger than four pounds, so this fellow looked like a giant beside me in the small canoe, snapping like an angry crocodile with teeth to match. It scared the living daylights out of me. I panicked and began hitting it on the head with the paddle.

“What are you doing?” one of my sons yelled from shore.

“I’m trying to kill it,” I yelled back, but then I calmed down a bit. I even managed to paddle back to shore without tipping the canoe.

When I was finally standing on shore, my trophy in my arms, I yelled, “Take a picture! Somebody take a picture!”

“Aren’t you going to keep it?” my wife asked.

“Of course I will keep it. I’m going to stuff this baby.”

“So what is your hurry?”

I had to admit, there was no hurry. This Northern Pike was mine, I would get it mounted, and it would hang on my wall until the day I died.

Now it doesn’t look you huge and frightening anymore, but every time I look at it I remember the rush I felt when I reeled in the big boy.

Just to prove that I didn't make up this story (after all I am a writer with a fertile imagination) here is a picture of me with my trophy.