Saturday afternoon, the opening day of the trout season, the phone rang as I was cleaning my own morning’s catch of a half-dozen stream brook trout. The call was from one of the gentlemen who had taken our advice to test the Uxbridge Pond waters.
Occasionally when Newfoundlanders talk quickly, because of their dialect it can be difficult to interpret what they are saying. What at first sounded like exuberant gibberish was quickly determined to simply be the excited voice of one of the islanders. Finally calming down, he explained that they had enjoyed their outing, canoeing and fly fishing on the pond, caught a dozen or so small trout, but just before leaving had the thrill of their lives when a trout, much bigger than any of the others sucked in one of their dry flies.
“Bloody thing towed our little canoe around that pond for fifteen minutes, eh, before we even saw him,” he swore. “Never saw anything like it,” he continued, “except one time thirty miles from shore back home when I hooked and landed a fifty-five pound halibut after it towed me out in the Atlantic, half-way to England.”
Dying to know about the Uxbridge adventure, I interjected, “Did you land it, or what? What was it? How big?”
“Yeah we got it all right…it’s a 23-inch brown trout, almost four pounds and it’s going to the taxidermist this afternoon,” he replied. “I’m taking this baby home with me when we go back!”
After he finished profusely thanking me for the assistance and instruction he had received in the club, along with the suggestion to fish the pond at Uxbridge, he asked if I would like to have a look at his trophy before he took it to be mounted, which I was delighted to do and at the same time snap a picture for the club album.
A few weeks later I learned that the Department of Lands and Forests had previously placed a couple of their retired brood stock of hatchery browns in the town pond in the hopes that one of the local kids in the town’s annual “Fishing Derby for Kids Day”4 would experience the excitement and adventure that my two friends from Newfoundland had enjoyed.
Another recollection also concerning the Uxbridge area, is a story I have told many times when reminiscing about my earlier days working over the brooks south of the town. I had just recovered from a terribly debilitating bout of poison ivy that covered me from head to foot. The noxious stuff was contacted on a previous trip to another stream a little west of Uxbridge after taking my girlfriend, Mona, with me to introduce her to my second favourite love, trout fishing. We had paused for a bite of lunch later in the morning and as it often does when it’s springtime and you’re eighteen years old, one thing led to another. I was too engrossed in the moment to notice that we were stretched out on a large bed of poison ivy until it was too late.
It took several weeks for the rash and pustules to fade and, having been on my back completely coated with lotion to soothe the itch for that long, it was a relief to get out of the house to wet a line once again. This time—on my own! Nevertheless, I still chose to head to my favourite brooks below Uxbridge for the hour or so that I had at my disposal, but kept well away from the poison ivy patch.
Most memories do fade somewhat after more than fifty years, but we are dealing here with magical memories, those that never wane or diminish. As it developed that day though, I was not the only one who had awakened in the morning with an urge to do a spot of fishing for a few brookies to bring home for supper. For some reason or another, the old Ford parked on the side of the gravel road had failed to catch my attention. Slipping on my hip boots a little way down the road from where I had parked my own car, I decided to avoid the more heavily fished area where the creek crossed beneath the road and access it instead a hundred yards downstream. In most of these places the trails disappear rather quickly when one works a little further on from the easiest access, normally where the brook crosses the road.
Hiking a few yards into the bush I could hear the brook gurgling seductively inviting me forward through a dense growth of six-feet-tall ostrich ferns. Suddenly I almost fell over a fisherman sitting by the edge of the creek—my mother! Comfortably ensconced in a bend of a huge, curling, tree root, she held a pocketbook in one hand with her fishing rod in the other, while her line disappeared through the grassy blanket topping the little brook. Mum was so engrossed in her book, probably a Harlequin romance novel, that she was completely unaware of both her son’s presence and the gentle twitching of her rod tip.
Gord’s mother, Helen, at The Beach in Toronto near the Fallingbrook neighbourhood; photo taken in the mid-1940s.
Trying not to unduly alarm her, I gently said, “Mother, I think you’ve got one on…using worms, eh?”
Without batting an eye she replied, “Of course I’m using worms. How else can you fish here? Oh! It’s you, Gordon! How did you know I was here?”
I explained while she reeled in another plump eight-incher, efficiently dispatching it before threading a fresh dew worm onto her hook, that I hadn’t known that she was fishing there—or even realized that she knew about the waters of the Uxbridge area. Undeniably, a very special memory indeed!
If there is one river with its magical waters that has created more memories than any other during my sixty-five years of trout fishing it is the Ganny. Only the mighty Broadback River in northern Quebec, with its huge brook trout, takes up as much space in the part of my brain that stores these recollections.
Over my many years of working over the Ganny, we have learned that the numerous and varied sections of the watershed with their complexions switch abruptly from shallow and fast, clay and meadow waters, to heavily tangled bush-bordered pothole sections. Such variations have led to our creating a range of nicknames1 for specific locations, names such as the “Red River stretch,” “Picnic Grounds,” “Nudie stretch,” “Used Car Lot,” “Fly-fishing stretch” and the infamous “Allan Hepburn stretch.”
The “Allan Hepburn stretch”2 of the Ganny has been responsible for several situations that will be forever etched in my memory—there certainly are a couple of lessons to be absorbed from recounting our adventures on this section of the river. The almost three-mile Hepburn portion is a veritable minefield of awkward and potentially dangerous stream, bush and swamp conditions that one must negotiate in order to fish its relatively untouched, therefore magical waters. Between the masses of jungle-like vines and enormous multi-trunk trees are tangles of six-feet-tall grass, ferns and goldenrod, much of which extends right over the stream bank. Beneath them are unseen, underfoot rotten logs and branches, interspersed with holes, just waiting to trip you up or break your ankle. If one survives those niceties there are always others with which to contend, such as the poison ivy, stinging nettles and needle-laced hawthorn trees and raspberry canes designed by Mother Nature to rip at, or pierce your skin. I haven t even touched on the seasonal mosquito, blackfly and deer fly infestations. My fishing buddies and I are seldom concerned about overfishing or finding other folks plying these