By Chris Cowland –
From age four, I lived in a small English village called Eton Wick. You crossed the country road outside my house, and you could walk the path through a wheat field, and find yourself on the banks of the River Thames, right across from the famous Windsor Racecourse. From a very early age, I would take off with my dog, a bag of sandwiches, a flask of tea and my fishing rod.
I never caught much, certainly nothing of edible size, but there is nothing more relaxing than sitting on a riverbank with your dog lying by your side, watching your float bob up and down. Rowers from Eton College would pass by, with their coaches trying to keep up with them on bicycles along the towpath, and the beautiful passenger boats would sweep majestically past every hour taking tourists to Boveney Lock and then back into Windsor.
So when we moved to Winnipeg in 1980, and my new in-laws invited us to their island cabin in Lake of the Woods, I really relished the thought of catching some of the famed Winnipeg goldeye, or tasty pickerel. We borrowed their pontoon boat, packed a cooler, unwrapped my new Canadian Tire fishing rod, and selected a shiny red devil as a lure. We had charts of the lake showing the purportedly best secret fishing spots, and off we set.
I was quite successful in catching smallmouth bass, and very many Northern Pike. The poor pike is despised by most anglers, as it is slimy and smelly, and if it slaps around in your boat you have a summer skating rink, and a major cleanup when you get home. A bony fish, almost impossible to fillet, but cut into steaks it is easy to remove the bones from the cooked meat, and it is extremely flavourful.
One particular weekend we had been out for about half an hour, and the “no fish, no beer” rule was starting to irk me. I had cast out my line, and was reeling it in when it appeared to have caught on a rock or an underwater log. We turned off the outboard, and I tried to reel in. It was very difficult to do so, and as I relaxed, the line started to play out. In a few seconds, the whole boat started moving out from shore, and it was taking most of my strength to just hold on. I would reel it in, it would pull back. I fought the fish for over an hour, and eventually pulled it up to the stern of the boat. There was a huge black monstrosity about six feet long at the end of the line, and we had an instant of eye contact before it shook its barbel-mouthed head and snapped the line. I found out later that this was a sturgeon, probably 70 years old (the record in the lake was a 1,000-pound specimen over 11 feet long).
My kids always loved fishing in the lake, and our cabin was a magnet for local fishing guides, who became quite a nuisance. My son, on his honeymoon, got fed up with these unwanted visitors, and strolled naked down the dock wearing nothing but a smile, his rod in his hand. The fishermen never returned.
