Memories of Magical Waters. Gord Deval
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we had used.
“On what!” he exclaimed.
“E.G.B.,” I spelled out for him, “They’re little spinning lures, made in Switzerland.” I left it at that for the moment while I placed our tackle on the dock and Art carted the trout to what was obviously a fish-cleaning table on shore near the foot of the dock. Then pointing to the spinning rods, I said, to the apparently still befuddled chap, “Heh, Russ, have a look for yourself. They’re still on both the spinning rods.”
He examined the two tiny Swiss spinning lures and said, “Pretty bloody small! What the hell does ‘EBL’ mean anyhow, Deval?”
This time I spelled it out determinedly, “They’re EGBs and damned if I know what the letters stand for, probably the name of the outfit in Switzerland that makes them or something. All I can tell you is that they sure work great on trout. All trout!”
When I asked if he would like to try the lures for himself, it became evident that he did not have a spinning rod. Luckily I had another inexpensive spinning outfit in the car as a spare in case one of our regular outfits broke down or something. We gave Russell a quick lesson on how to use the tackle as we had done previously with Old Lessie at Brooks Lake. After he made a few casts to get the feel of the strange equipment, he seemed to believe that he could use it well enough and offered to pay for it. When we said the rod was on us, he refused to charge us the regular five bucks for the privilege of fishing on his territory and even said our boat would be free too, the next time we came back.
Of course his prognosis was dead on. We have fished Mosque Lake hundreds of times since that splendid initial visit to one of the most magical waters I have ever wet a line in. The lake has created dozens of special memories for me and my fishing buddies. The fruits of several of those delightful labours now hang resplendently on my walls at home.
Grants Lake is one of the tiniest speckled trout waters that I’ve fished and deserves a place here, but for an entirely different reason. Only a half a mile long and at its widest, a spit in width if one possessed good lungs, Grants produced excellent fly-fishing catches over a couple years for us until a devastating winterkill5 applied the coup de gras to its fishery. Deemed unsuitable for natural reproduction, the Ministry of Natural Resources (formerly the Department of Lands and Forests) subsequently refused to stock it again after learning about the destructive exposure.
The lake is four or five miles off the beaten path, about ten miles north of Buckshot Lake where we used to stay at Bev Woolnough’s Birch Lodge near Plevna. There had been successive years of fine spring and summer fishing on Grants when, along with a couple of buddies, we decided to try a little hard-water fishing there one winter weekend. Al Jones and Norm Wallachy were invited to join me for what was expected to be a pleasant jaunt, with two of us on the Skidoo and the third in the attached sled with all the fishing and shore lunch gear.
It began snowing rather heavily during the four-hour trip from Toronto and had not yet ceased when we arose the next morning to pack and head off to the lake. Skidoos are vehicles designed to negotiate most snow conditions, but even the best of them quickly lose their efficiency if heavily loaded down and faced with extreme snow depths. Today’s more modern snowmobiles are better equipped to deal with those conditions than the narrow-tracked machines produced in the sport’s infancy.
Mrs. Woolnough of Birch Lodge was well-known for her culinary skills. From The Outdoorsman: Ontario’s Voice of the Outdoors, 1963. Courtesy of Barry Penhale.
With one and sometimes two of the fellows baling out every so often to lighten the load on hills, we managed to negotiate the seven-mile trip up the bush road. This was followed by a three-mile trail across an ancient farm and several frozen swamps that lead right to the edge of the lake. As is our custom when ice fishing, the first objective is to get the holes cut and the tackle set up. While important, but secondary, a spot has to be cleared for the ever-present dinner fire on shore and, accordingly, enough wood gathered to last the day.
On Grants there is a swamp several hundred yards down one side of the lake with a nice stand of dead birch and cedar where enough can easily be knocked down with the Swedish saw to serve our purpose. I had to pay my respects to the bush for a few moments and, by the time I struggled back through the deep snow, the fellows had the holes and tackle organized. It was left up to me to unhook the sled from the Skidoo to lighten the load, then head on down the lake, fell a couple of dead trees, rope them and drag them back to where we were set up on shore.
The holes were cut and the ice-fishing buzzers (Fish O’Buzzer) were set up in short order. I eased the old Skidoo off shore and onto the deep snow on the lake, moving cautiously because occasionally the combination of a severe load of snow with little ice thickness actually depresses the ice, forcing water up through various cracks in the ice. When this happens, the water and snow become slush, a sloppy mess as much as a foot or two thick. A peculiar spinoff of these conditions occurs when there is more water on the lake’s surface than the snow can actually absorb, at which time gravity enables it to locate the lowest point on the surface where a crack has occurred and it trickles back through the ice into the lake. As the water increases and the hole enlarges, like the water in your bathtub or sink back home, it swirls in clockwise fashion while continuing to drain. The swirling action of the water gradually creates an enlarged hole with a continuous whirlpool action as the eddy and hole constantly enlarge.
I’m not certain why, but most ice fisherman refer to these lake surface winter abnormalities as “sump holes” and treat them with the utmost respect as the swirling waters polish and narrow the edges making them precarious should one approach too closely for a better look. As the Skidoo forged its way through and across the deep snow down the side of the lake towards the swamp and dead trees, I could easily see several places where sump holes occurred. These were partially covered with newly fallen snow, which had appropriately darkened as it absorbed the swirling water.
Hearing a whoop of success from the lads back at the end of the lake spurred me into a “haste makes waste” mode. As I scrambled through the deep snow towards the first dead birch, an unseen branch buried in the drifts grabbed my foot, pitching me headfirst into three feet of snow. Shaking it off, I forced a laugh at my carelessness and carefully took down the birch and two slightly smaller dead cedars. The birch has better staying power, but the cedar is great for getting things underway by establishing a good bed of coals for building a fire. One end of the load was fastened with a couple of slip knots to the tow bar. Because the snow is almost always substantially deeper near shore and the machine now also had to contend with a couple of hundred pounds of dead trees to drag, I headed towards the middle of the lake. Oops! A huge mistake!
A rather large and ominous dark spot out there clearly indicated the presence of a sump hole, with the shading emanating from its epicentre four or five feet in all directions, clearly one to be treated with caution. However, the drag of the trees made jockeying the snowmobile from side to side, with my weight on the rear to prevent the skis from digging in, a necessity to avoid becoming bogged down in the deep snow. While wrestling with the machine I kept one eye on the threatening shadow in the centre of the lake.
Progress was slow, but steady until I suddenly discovered that the snow that I had been riding on was only a veneer on top of a foot or two of deep slush. The big machine bogged down. I had cautiously maintained what I felt was a respectful distance from the sump hole in the middle, only to learn that I was now very near to another nasty one, which because of a freshly driven snowdrift was previously undetectable. I slid off the seat and promptly found that the slush and water were well over my boot tops and rapidly wicking their way into my upper clothing.
There are various ploys that can be used to extricate oneself from this situation, such as elevating the skis then rocking the machine gently while pushing from the rear with mild track acceleration, or pulling from the front while another operates the throttle. The suspension, however, was so clogged up with the heavy, now-compacted slush that