We worked our way up the hill, selected the tallest tree and with a boost from us, Ron began to negotiate the difficult climb. At least, it looked rather formidable to me with little space between the branches, but he scrambled up as easily as climbing a fight of stairs. Even before he reached the uppermost branches he let out a yell,
“I see it! I see it, Dad!” Pointing back in the direction from whence we had just come, he hollered, “It’s just back there a little. We must have walked right by it without seeing it.”
That is exactly what had happened. The bush is so dense in those never-logged hills that we had actually passed within a couple of hundred yards of the lake. We were probably sidetracked by another game trail, plenty of which criss-cross the bush in all directions forming a lacy network that can easily lead to disorientation.
Ron and Randy Deval fishing at Butternut Lake in the early 1970s.
Fifteen minutes later after my having to endure a number of snide remarks from the “cheap seats” about their old man’s sense of direction, we stumbled out of the bush directly onto the rocky promontory which had been our intended target all along. While I sat for a few moments to collect my thoughts and recharge my batteries, the boys set their tackle up and were in action before I was even back up on my feet. Randy was the first to score—and he scored big time with a lovely twenty-incher.
Capping the day and the memories of the trip with my sons to Grants Lake was the thrill and excitement of limit catches of specks for the boys. None was kept, other than Randy’s first, which, as it developed, turned out to be the day’s largest. The old man was skunked—but did achieve a small victory nevertheless. We made it back to the car with only a bare minimum of miscalculated trail decisions.
Bearing the name of Lucky Lake there is no way that it could escape being included in this compendium of magical waters and memories. Lucky is a lake trout and a bass lake and has produced quite a few lakers for us, some weighing as much as eleven pounds, exceptionally large for a comparatively small lake, less than three miles long and a half-mile wide. Lucky is truly magical as it also produces some of the largest smallmouth bass to be found in the province—trophy fish, twenty-six inches long and eight pounds.
A particular memory comes to mind of a morning on Lucky when we were fly fishing the edge of a weed bed, searching for one of the lake’s behemoth bass but attracting only perch after perch to our feathered offerings.
It was near the end of June with bass season open, but the spring-fed lake was still quite cold. We had not given any thought to the possibility of the lakers, normally a cold and deep water fish, still cruising the shallows that late in the season as they do shortly after ice-out.
My old buddy, Art Walker, and I were tossing Mickey Finn streamer flies7 into the weed lines, attempting to entice one of the lake’s big bass into believing these lures were the lake’s predominant minnows, golden shiners. Just as I hooked another perch, Art thought he saw a leviathan boil just beneath the surface behind his fly. He had barely mentioned it when the water erupted under my little perch and Mickey Finn. I was fast to a racing locomotive of a fish streaking for the deep water in the centre of the small lake. Fortunately it hadn’t chosen the weed bed area to dive into, or we might never have had a chance to determine what it was.
“Gotta be a big trout!” Art yelled, as my reel screamed. “Bass never run like that and almost always head for cover, not deep water.”
Too excited to respond, I merely grinned and nodded in agreement while holding the rod high and upright to cushion the fish’s antics as it was now shaking its head violently in attempts to remove the constant pressure being applied by the rod, line and me. A meal of a small perch had never created this kind of a problem for the big trout before—only the odd foreign object stuck in its jaw, when it had once upon a time carelessly mistaken a fishing lure for a minnow. (The trout still wore a scar in its lip where a hook had penetrated before being torn out when another angler had applied too much pressure on that occasion).
“Whoa there, fish,” I pleaded, easing the pressure on the line in the sudden realization that the trout or whatever probably was not fast to my fly, but simply hanging on to and refusing to forfeit its meal. If I had had my wits about me when the fish struck, I would have given it enough slack to swallow the perch, but after all its contortions, if slack were applied to the line now the fish might simply let go and release the perch. I maintained a slight pressure and crossed my fingers, toes and eyes for luck.
The foolish fish, apparently not wishing to release its “catch,” hung on until fifteen or twenty minutes later we were able to work it alongside the boat and carefully slide the landing net under it—a thirty-three-inch-long, eleven-pound lake trout. To this day it remains the largest I have landed on a fly—pardon me, on a fly rod!
An earlier section involving Grants Lake, recounted a tale of horrendous conditions during a winter ice-fishing trip. Exceptionally deep snow, heavy slush and dangerous sump holes, all combined with Arctic-like freezing temperatures, were the nemeses on that occasion. Similar situations occurred several times and in a number of areas. A few that come to mind occurred on A/B, Limit and Beanpole lakes in Haliburton, but without doubt the most memorable and possibly most dangerous incident in my sixty-plus years of ice fishing and snowmobiling occurred on little Lucky Lake in the Land O’ Lakes.
That year, as well, was a winter with an exceptional snow load on the frozen waters of the Land O’ Lakes, with temperatures below zero on many of the weekends that were chosen by us to test our hard-water fishing skills on the various trout lakes in that area. Lucky Lake was selected for a couple of reasons: gorgeous, large and plentiful lake trout and an interesting and challenging cross-country and cross-lake Skidoo trip to get there from our cabin on Buckshot Lake. Conquering adversity on these trips is for us half the pleasure in a sort of masochistic manner. We were supplied with a great deal of that “pleasure” after a memorable winter day on Lucky Lake.
Getting to Lucky from Birch Lodge in the winter required either a lengthy, time-consuming drive trailering the machines, two of them and the Ski-boose, around a number of country back roads, or snowmobiling three or four miles across Buckshot. From there we would pick up a trail at the far end of the lake that leads to Brule Lake, then it’s a good mile and a half run across Brule to another trail and, finally, a half-mile run through the bush to Lucky. Disregarding the challenging conditions, of course, we chose the latter.
On trips of this nature it always behooves one to leave word with others of the intended destination and course of action in case of difficulties. Having experienced several of these winter ice-fishing junkets that bordered on the brink of extreme peril, word was left with Bev Woolnough, the proprietor of Birch Lodge, that we would be heading out in the wee hours the following morning (Saturday) and crossing both Buckshot and Brule in order to get to Lucky to fish for lakers. Bev told us what we already knew, that the ice and snow conditions were rotten and suggested fishing Brooks Lake, smaller and much closer by, for specks. But our minds were made up and Lucky it was to be. After all, we surmised, our experience with these conditions would stand us in good stead and actually we were looking forward to the difficult snowmobiling as much as we were the fishing. We left instructions that even if we were not back by dark, not to send a search and rescue party as we felt quite confident in our own ability to look after ourselves, no matter what the situation. It would have been dangerous and foolish for others to head out in darkness looking for us in those conditions.
“However,” I did suggest, “heh, if we’re not back by morning, then maybe help would be appropriate.”
We