A New Manitoba Record!
Day
6 “49 Is the New 43”
“Forty-one may be a trophy, but
thirty-five will absolutely rip your arm off,” I said as Chris hauled in the
first of three forty plus-inch fish he would pull in that afternoon. Monster Cove was absolutely on fire! After a successful morning of trolling for
lake trout, following by an unsuccessful venture down the river that runs out
of Lake Kamuchawie, we had our usual late lunch at 3:00 and didn’t get out of
the cabin until after 4:00 that afternoon.
The good news was that the clouds had finally parted and we aimed at
making a killing with the pike.
First a note on the setting
accompanying the boat ride to Monster Cove.
On the way to Monster Cove are the four small islands that give boaters
a visual reminder that there is a reef to cross. It’s like boating through the closing jaws of
a monster. On the other side of the jaws
of death, all the trees are burned from the ’05 fire. They stand upright like white bones sticking
out of the ground, ominous femurs from a slaughterhouse that warn others not to
enter through the gates or face the consequences of the monsters beyond. Not that we listen.
As if to punctuate that point, there
is a reef with one white rock the size of a watermelon sticking up out of the
water right before the entrance to the slaughterhouse, a depth charge left over
from a long ago Canadian war perhaps.
Twice at cruising speed I’ve focused on the teeth of the reef and missed
the depth charge by mere feet. But if
your boat makes it through to the other side and into the boneyard unscathed,
ahead lies Monster Cove, a place with pike as scary as its name.
For the first time in days we had
sunshine, and for the first time since we were dropped off nearly a week ago,
there was no discernable wind. It was by
far the best day we were to have on the entire trip. Monster Cove took on a mirror reflection of
the bones lining its banks. This led us
to believe that topwater lures would again be the ticket. They weren’t.
Apparently the gurgle…gurgle…gurgle
of a Top Raider, or the clack…clack…clacking of a buzz bait only disturbed the
peaceful nature of this graveyard. The
fish didn’t find them appealing, and I didn’t want to waste time being an
intruder in nature as opposed to part of nature, so I again went to the in-line
spinners and wigglers and spoons that casted like cow bells and must have
sounded to the fish like dinner bells.
We boated no fish under thirty-two inches, and Chris caught his fish of
the trip, a forty-three inch monster pike that inhaled a spoon that looked to
resemble a fish’s red gills.
A fish that big takes a team
effort to land., one on the rod and the other on the net. As soon as the fish is netted, the anger
drops the rod, grabs the slimy fish-handling gloves, the mouth spreader, and
the hook remover. While the net man does
everything he can to keep the monster from twisting and turning in the net and
getting tangled, the man with the tools says a little prayer and puts his hands
within reach of the monster’s razor-sharp teeth. Measurements, weighing, pictures, and
reviving the behemoth, and it’s a five-minute rest in the boat as the scene is
replayed over and over, and high fives are given out as heartbeats slowly come
back down.
Then Chris’ fish of the trip was
replaced by a behemoth forty-nine inch Laestrygonian pike. Chris had casted another long, ugly-looking
fly and was stripping it in slowly, tantalizingly, knowing that the hovering
motion was too much for these monsters to resist. When the pike hit the fly, Chris set the hook
and knew immediately it was a good one, but he truly had no idea what he had on
the line.
While Chris was fighting the monster,
the glare from the sun kept him from seeing it. I caught a glimpse of it and made the mistake
of saying out loud, “Holy cow! That
thing is fifty inches!” Immediately I
wished I could take it back because I didn’t want to put more pressure on
Chris. I know that if Chris had said
that to me and I hadn’t seen it yet, I would probably go jelly-legged.
We sat for fifteen minutes
afterwards just shaking our heads and repeating in as many different ways as we
could, “That fish was forty-nine inches!” as if one of the wordings was going
to help our unbelieving brains register the fact that we landed and released a
four-foot beast on a fly rod. Chris
immediately retired that fly.
Chris confided to me afterwards,
“When you said he was fifty, I told myself, ‘Ryan doesn’t know how to judge
length,’ so that I could calm myself.” I
suspect that when he himself finally saw the monster, there were no amount of
Jedi mind tricks that were going to slow his heartbeat.
Unless you’re talking about the
size of the fish, monster pike fishing is not a numbers game, like, “I caught
thirty fish today.” Each monster takes
as many as five minutes to land, as many as five minutes to release safely, and
usually five minutes or more to rehash
the battle with high fives.
That’s fifteen minutes per fish on average if they are biting well. Despite this, we boated a lot of fish that
day, and all of them huge.
It will be a day long remembered,
but we were to get some interesting news a week after the fishing trip. Chris applied for a Master Angler Award,
sending the picture and the measurement in the Manitoba wildlife
department. We knew that we had a lake
record in that forty-nine incher. But
when the officials e-mailed Chris back, they informed him that he now owned the
Manitoba Provincial Record for a northern pike caught on a fly rod! I shot a progression of pictures of Chris
holding up that massive fish, and in each successive picture his arm is
slumping. It was so heavy that it was
impossible for this former college football player to hold it up!
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