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.
Gord and Johnny Finnegan making their way along the treacherous shoreline of Brooks Lake.
My fishing buddies back in the forties were Art Walker, Bill Taylor and Johnny Finnegan. Because Art had carelessly chosen the May 1, the first “opening day” weekend, on which to get married, the odious task of exploring Brooks Lake and its wondrous brook trout fishery was left to Bill, Johnny and myself. With my uncle’s scribbled directions clutched in Bill’s hand, an Ontario Highway map in John’s and mine firmly affixed to the steering wheel of my ten-year-old Buick, we left Toronto in the wee hours of the morning. The plan was to get to Brooks Lake in time to wet a line before dark. Uncle Bob had also suggested that it would be in our best interests if we were to drop in and introduce ourselves to Bev Woolnough and take a look at the lodge. We had previously planned on just finding the lake, fishing until dark, then going back to Birch Lodge to spend the night in one of their cabins or whatever.
Much later, after half a day of travelling and negotiating an unbelievingly hilly and twisting twenty-five miles of back road, which culminated in another ridiculously difficult eight miles of corduroy road (logs laid across the muck, supposedly to allow for automobile travel), we pulled up beside Birch Lodge. Having heard the old Buick approaching, Bev Woolnough was waiting outside to greet us. He gave us the final directions to the trail a few miles up the road that would lead us to our anticipated “pot of gold,” along with the instructions for finding the boat.
Several hours later, and already pooped after getting lost several times while attempting to stick to the semblance of a trail supposedly leading to the lake, we struggled through the tangles of shoreline brush, swamp and dead trees for another hour or so in a fruitless search for the, “old trapper’s boat under a couple of cedars, right beside a dead birch.” With the sun approaching the horizon, we were almost ready to throw in the towel, and get an early start the next day when we heard a voice emanating from somewhere in the bush behind us,
“You boys looking for the boat?”
It was Lessie, looking exactly as one might imagine a toothless old hermit living in the bush should look. We introduced ourselves, offered him his chews and thanked him for the instructions tossed idly over his shoulder as he retreated into the bush,
“It’s just back there a bit you know, beside the dead birch. You must have almost tripped over the old scow.”
Johnny was the first to report that he had found it as he hoisted an assortment of flotsam and jetsam to reveal the outline of the ancient trapper’s scow almost buried in the water and shoreline muck. Bills truly appropriate comment as we wrestled with the hulk to free it from the suction of the swamp and scoop out handfuls of mud and weeds broke the tension of our disappointment, “I think the goddamn thing’s taken root!”
Once the laughter subsided we were finally able to wrench the thing out of its temporary grave, then set about trying to make it seaworthy, at least sufficiently seaworthy enough to launch. The boat was necessary, as there appeared to only be one or two places where one could fish from shore and they were on the opposite side of the lake. Fly fishing would be almost impossible unless we could make the boat workable. There was only an hour or so of daylight left when we finally pushed off to the lyrical sounds of Johnny’s belting out, “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men…”
With our butts glued to the rickety seats, our fingers crossed and our weight centred in the tipsy craft, we used a couple of trimmed branches to pole the thing around while the fly rods were being quickly strung and flies fastened. The old waterlogged wooden floorboards were so slippery that we dared not stand, so our casting prowess was about to be thoroughly tested.
Nevertheless our feathered attractions hardly hit the water when we were fast to a couple of fine brookies, larger
