For those of us who live and fish in the United States, there is something both comforting and terrifying about our giant neighbor to the north.
Comforting because we know that no matter how overfished and crowded our home waters may become, there will remain thousands of lakes and rivers in Canada that are rarely visited by humans.
Terrifying because we know that we will never have time to explore even a tiny fraction of the country up there. A person who wants to sample all the fishing in Canada comes up fast and hard against the old mortality dilemma: So much water, Lord, and so little time.
Canada is enormous. It sprawls across more than 3.8 million square miles and it is absolutely crammed with water. The Northwest Territories alone covers 1.25 million square miles, an area larger than all the states east of the Mississippi combined, and contains more than nine percent of the world's supply of fresh water.
Most of the Yukon and Northwest Territories and the northern portions of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Labrador contain so many rivers and interconnected lakes that a resolute adventurer with a good canoe, a prodigious supply of food, and deep reserves of determination can paddle thousands of miles without portaging more than a few miles at a time. If you had the resources and the patience you could go weeks without setting foot on land.
Before this starts sounding like a paid endorsement for Tourism Canada, let me remind you that Canada has its faults. In the north, where the fishing is best, the weather can be miserable. During the spring and summer there are so many biting and sucking insects hungry for blood that repellent is useless and an angler without a headnet begins to fear he's being sucked dry.
IF YOU DRIVE AN AUTOMOBILE in Canada you soon grow weary of paying $2.50 or $3.00 for a gallon of gasoline. And for a country so vast and wild, there can be a lot of bureaucratic nonsense to wade through and far too many complex regulations. In northern Ontario, for example, in the vast and lovely region north of Lakes Huron and Superior, nonresidents over 18 years old who camp on public land--90 percent of the region--must obtain a camping permit and pay a fee of $10 (Canadian) per person, per night. And nonresidents visiting Newfoundland and Labrador are required to hire a local guide at rates of $40 to $200 per day to fish for trout or Atlantic salmon more than a quarter mile away from a road.
So it's not all milk and honey in the land of plenty. But swarms of black flies and mosquitoes can be endured, I've found, when you're catching 10-pound lake trout every third cast or when northern pike the length of canoe paddles are slamming your Rapala every time you're imprudent enough to toss it in the water. And with the U.S. dollar currently worth something like $1.41 Canadian, the price of gasoline, guides, and camping is not as unreasonable as it could be.
When I recall some of the trips I've made to Canada over the past 25 years I'm struck by the nature of what I remember. Not just big fish and a lot of them, but the qualities of the country: big and unspoiled, with water so clear you can count pebbles on the bottom 30 feet down, and air so clean and crisp it's like snorting shots of pure oxygen.
I can't think of a single outing that has not included encounters with bears, moose, caribou, coyotes, and wolves. I think back to August mornings on a high mountain lake in the Canadian Rockies where rainbows beneath shoreline vegetation--hiding out like largemouth bass beneath Florida lily pads--would come charging after a grasshopper imitation if I splatted it next to shore and made it pop and gurgle like a miniature Jitterbug.
I REMEMBER FAT NATIVE CUTTHROATS in Alberta rivers that flowed east from the foothills of the Rockies and wound in great sweeping meanders across the plains. I remember Ontario lakes so full of northern pike that they would slash at a lure even after it was clamped in another pike's jaws and I would sometimes end up battling two fish at once. I remember smallmouth bass in New Brunswick rivers and jewel-bright brook trout from the ponds that dot the Newfoundland tundra like seeds broadcast by a giant's hand. I remember standing on a rock escarpment in Quebec looking across 25 square miles of country free of roads and houses, and growing giddy with the knowledge that I had every bit of it to myself. I wouldn't have been more sure of possession if I owned title to it.
There are countless other places, places I have not yet been but that have been on my list of dream destinations since I was a kid and heard my father and uncles talking about them in wistful, almost reverent tones, or read about them myself in the outdoor magazines we kept in stacks around the house.
My list reads like a hall of fame of premier fishing trips: Back River, Northwest Territories, for arctic char and lake trout. Minipi Lake, Labrador, for brook trout. Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, for lake trout and Arctic grayling. Winisk River, Ontario, for brook trout. Wellesley Lake, Yukon, for lake trout. The Gold River, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, for summer steelhead. Kootenay Lake, British Columbia, for resident rainbow trout. God's River, Manitoba, for brook trout. Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan, for northern pike. Reindeer Lake, Saskatchewan, for lake trout. The Miramichi River, New Brunswick, for Atlantic salmon. The northeast coast of Prince Edward Island, for bluefin tuna. The list could go on and on.
CANADA HAS SO MUCH ANGLING VARIETY available that it is almost certain you can arrange a trip, regardless of your budget, that will be among the most memorable of your life. You can spend $5,000 for a week in a luxury lodge at a fly-in destination or you can spend $20 for a nonresident license and drive to a lake packed with three-pound walleyes.
You can book passage on ferries that stitch the coasts of British Columbia or Newfoundland, disembarking in villages that can't be reached any other way and that are surrounded by nearly virgin territory. You can hire charter boats and catch 30-pound Chinook salmon off the coast of British Columbia and 30-pound striped bass off the coast of New Brunswick.
You can fly in a float plane over hundreds of lakes and select one the way you might select a diamond ring from a jeweler's display case. You can travel to remote regions by passenger train and get out anywhere the urge strikes you--then catch passage home merely by standing beside the rails and waving a train down. You can launch a canoe into a north-flowing river and paddle and portage for weeks without seeing another angler or passing beneath a road bridge.
Until recently it was a rare road that extended much north of the 50th parallel. Although the bulk of Canada is still accessible only by air or boat, recent road development has opened enormous tracts of land to exploration and has given relatively easy access to countless rivers and lakes. It has made it possible to reach new territory by automobile, which is a boon for budget-minded anglers but threatens the very qualities that make the backcountry so special. Roads tend to breed new roads; they branch away from one another like new growth from root stock and it will only be a matter of time before entire regions are crisscrossed with highways and dotted with vacation homes.
With the encroachment of civilization and increasing numbers of visitors to Canada has come a new attitude toward conservation and preservation. It is becoming less common to meet carloads of anglers returning home to the U.S. with coolers packed full of fillets, not because fish can't be caught in large numbers but because fewer anglers are treating Canadian waters like wholesale meat markets. More and more fishing camps and lodges are encouraging--and in some cases, demanding--that anglers keep a few fish for shore lunches, take home a trophy or two for mounting, and release the rest of their fish. Some camps ask their guests to use barbless hooks. Some promote fly fishing only. Some are careful to distribute their clients across a large territory so that no single place gets heavy pressure.
For the lodges, such conservation measures may well be a matter of survival. It can take 10 years for a lake trout in northern Canada to grow to three pounds, and 20 years for it to reach 10 pounds. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happens when every 20-year-old fish that is caught is killed.
As much as I love the adventure of a fly-in trip, most of my own traveling in Canada has been on the budget plan. My idea of a budget trip is driving most of the night, pulling into a quiet spot beside a river for a two-hour nap in the car, and breakfasting on apples and sandwiches from the cooler.
SOME OF MY MOST ENJOYABLE TRIPS have been in Ontario north of Sault Ste. Marie, a city I can reach in two and a half hours from my home in northern Michigan. The prudent way to plan such a trip is to decide on a specific destination by studying topographical maps, reading guidebooks, or getting tips from people who have been there. My usual tactic over the years has been to have a general destination in mind and get there by dead reckoning.
I head north or east out of the Soo, then take the north fork at every intersection until the pavement gives way to gravel and the telephone lines disappear, then after 25 or 50 or 100 miles stop at a lake and launch my canoe into the water. You can reach fine country and outstanding fishing this way, without paying for a pilot or a guide. You paddle the length of the lake to the mouth of a tributary river and follow it upstream until you reach the first rapids. Portage the rapids, paddle two or three miles to where the river widens into a small lake, cross to the falls on the far shore and portage to the slow water above, then paddle to yet another lake and make camp at dusk on an island.
I'm remembering a particular island, of course, on a particular lake. I first came to that place 20 years ago, and within a few days was already thinking of it as my own island and my own lake. That first morning, early, while the sun beamed pink on the pines on the far shore and the water was so calm it looked like you could skate across it, I rolled out of my tent, pulled on jeans and a pair of sneakers, rigged my spinning rod, and walked 15 feet to the water's edge. I cast a red-and-white Daredevl, the lure of choice across most of Canada, and watched it soar far out into the lake and slice without splashing into the water. It was an act of simple faith. I had never fished in the lake and did not know if it was home to pike or bass or trout or to any fish at all.
As I retrieved the lure I listened to the first breathlike rustle of the breeze in the trees and knew that this far upstream from the main lake I would not hear the sounds of automobiles or outboards. Later in the morning a float plane would pass high overhead, bound for some lodge or tent-camp to the north, but it would be the only engine I heard while I stayed on my island.
Someone else had camped there once--I had set my tent beside the telltale ring of stones and charred fragments of wood--but it was hard to tell if they had been there a month ago or a decade ago. As remote as the country seemed, I could have been in northern Labrador or interior British Columbia. I could have been a voyageur laying claim to his own 100 square miles of wilderness.
That first cast my lure was nailed hard by a northern pike that weighed perhaps five pounds. It turned out to be a little bigger than average for that lake, but only a little.
THE TREMENDOUS APPEAL OF CANADA is not merely the quality of its fishing. When you're drifting on a lake in a canoe, say in Quebec north of the St. Lawrence, or in Ontario above Lake Superior, or in the old-growth forests of British Columbia inland from Vancouver, the great attraction of the place--I'm tempted to say the magic of it--comes from an exciting, virtually palpable sense of possibility. Even in the cities and the relatively civilized portions of the nation you can sense the presence of all that vast unspoiled territory to the north.
It's in the air as surely as the scent of pine and the sound of running water. Canada contains most of the remaining wild country in North America. It is the last priceless reserve, the place we measure against all the other places we love to fish, and a reminder to all of us of just how much has been lost from the world.
For More Information:
Alberta
1-800-661-8888
British Columbia
1-800-663-6000
Manitoba
1-800-665-0040
New Brunswick
1-800-561-0123 (in U.S. and Canada)
1-800-442-4442 (in New Brunswick)
Newfoundland
1-800-563-6353
Northwest Territories
1-800-661-0788
Nova Scotia
1-800-341-6096 (in U.S.)
1-800-565-0000 (in Canada)
Ontario
1-800-668-2746
Prince Edward Island
1-800-565-0267
Quebec
1-800-363-7777
Saskatchewan
1-800-667-7191
Yukon
403-667-5340
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved.
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