Memories of Magical Waters. Gord Deval
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no longer was able to hide my own enthusiasm. “Where in hell and how in hell did you catch that? It’s got to weigh over eight—maybe even nine pounds!”
With Ron speaking first, their story spilled out excitedly, “Randy got it, Dad, right below the dam. It almost broke his rod charging all over the pool trying to get away.”
“I wasn’t going to let it break my rod,” Randy interjected, “so I slid down the bank into the water to keep it from trying to get under a bunch of logs. Ronnie jumped in near the logs, too, to help me steer it in the other direction where the water was shallower.”
Ron explained the rest of the struggle and eventual capture. Seemingly, when Randy finally got the fish into the shallow water at the bottom of the pool, they both jumped on top of it and dragged it up on shore. Their pleasure was somewhat marred for fear I would be angry at them for getting their shoes and clothes soaking wet.
“Are you kidding,” I said, “I’d jump in myself if I ever caught a trout as big as that one! It’s way bigger than any brown I’ve ever caught.”
As a matter of fact, to this day my son’s big brownie is still larger than any I have caught ever since that episode thirty-five years ago.
Randy Deval at ten years of age: his first overnight camping trip and his first large brown trout.
According to Gord, his will stipulates that his ashes are to be spread on this pool of the Ganny.
There is a rather inconspicuous pool on this Picnic Grounds stretch, about half a mile upstream from where we leave the car and just around the corner from the swimming hole, the deepest spot in this entire section of the Ganny. It, too, has provided me with several wonderful memories.
A four-and a-half-pound male brownie sporting a huge kipe (an extension of the lower jaw of a male fish that occurs during spawning) fell to one of my fly-fishing efforts on the river there while filming a show for the CBC television network. The same hole provided me with one of the biggest thrills I have ever experienced in all my years of fishing for trout. It was the largest rainbow trout, actually a steelhead, to have ever tested my tackle and patience—and lost!
Weighing almost twenty pounds and thirty-seven inches in length, the trout took over half an hour of my splashing up and down the stream, while first it charged in one direction then another, frantically attempting to break free, before finally being brought to captured. Really big rainbows rarely break the surface, normally preferring to fight their battles in the depths, however that fellow hadn’t read the “rainbow trout manual.” With its head shaking violently from side to side, it was airborne in exhilarating leaps and cartwheels at least six or seven times. It rests majestically now on a plaque above the piano in our dining room. The Picnic Grounds stretch of the Ganny has unquestionably earned its inclusion in my list of magical waters.
I have probably fished twenty-five or thirty of these, but only a few could be legitimately described in my recollections as truly magical. A few of the more memorable appear here beginning with Brooks Lake near Plevna, north of Kingston, Ontario.
In 1949 at the age of nineteen, I had yet to fish for speckled trout in any body of water larger than a stream, river or pond, with my largest catch, a seventeen-incher. My Uncle Bob, also a small-stream trout fisherman, owned a used-car business and had an ancient army truck advertised for sale. A phone call from a gentleman in the Land O’ Lakes forever changed that status quo for both of us. The man’s name was Bev Woolnough and he operated Birch Lodge on Buckshot Lake, halfway between the villages of Plevna and Vennacher Junction located in the general vicinity northeast of Kaladar on Highway 7.
As I subsequently fished with Mr. Woolnough for more than twenty years, using his lodge and cabins as a base for our explorations of many of the nearby and not so nearby Land O’ Lakes waters, I feel free to refer to him here as he preferred to be called, by his first name Bev. Visiting relatives in Toronto for Christmas that year, he had discovered the advertisement my uncle had been running for the old army truck. After a lengthy discussion he agreed to purchase the vehicle, but because he had his own car with him, only if my Uncle Bob would drive it up to his lodge on Buckshot Lake. As incentive he suggested that he would take my uncle ice-fishing for brook trout on a small body of nearby water, appropriately named Brooks Lake, and not charge him for a night’s lodging. The lake was named after an old fellow whose family had homesteaded the area, not for the fish.
This advertisement for Birch Lodge ran in The Outdoorsman: Ontario’s Voice of the Outdoors, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1963). Courtesy of Barry Penhale.
An avid fisherman especially when brookies were the intended goal, my uncle struck the deal. Realizing he would be a couple of hundred miles from home with no way of getting back to Toronto, Uncle Bob easily convinced Curly, his fishing buddy, to follow them to the Land O’ Lakes in his own car, with the ice fishing for speckled trout proving to be the catalyst in the discussion.
The day after they returned I was summoned to see what they had brought home—their limit of big speckled trout, which back then was fifteen pounds plus one. The sight was mind boggling to say the least, seven or eight brookies between three and four pounds each. I could hardly wait to test the lake for myself, however, with the legal trout fishing running from the first of May until the thirtieth of September, we had more than three months to dream and plan our own assault on Brooks Lake.
Like many of the thousands of lakes in Ontario, the lake was also known in some quarters by a second name, in this case, Burns Lake. However, there was an old gentleman, Les Brooks, living on a clearing carved out of the bush at one end of the lake. Apparently his folks had homesteaded the area many years earlier and Old Lessie, as he was known to all, simply carried on the family tradition. As the last of the Brooks family, and living the life of a hermit with only a couple of horses and an old goat that appeared as old as he for company, Lessie existed with only his tiny vegetable garden supplying food for sustenance. That, along with the few staples that Bev, the owner of Birch Lodge, would occasionally bring him, were all he had going for him.
When we phoned ahead to the lodge to inquire about fishing and renting a cabin by the lake, we were advised to take a couple of cans of “chews” for the old fellow who lives there. Later, when for the first time we met him, we discovered the truth of the suggestion as his eyes searched our pockets, looking hopefully for the tell-tale bulge of a couple of tins of tobacco. We were fortunate that Bev had previously warned us about Lessie’s predilection for the “chew,” otherwise we would never have located the old trapper’s boat near the end of the trail. Originally Bev had told us that it was pulled up on shore under a couple of fallen cedar trees, right beside a big dead birch. Uh huh! It turned out that the shoreline of the mile-long lake was totally layered with fallen cedars and dead birches.