As a newcomer to Canada in 1967, I needed a
house, a car, and a boat. There was not much left for a boat. I bought a camera from a soldier at CFB Petawawa about to be posted to Germany. “Do you need a boat?”, he asked casually. An hour later a 12-ft aluminum was sitting in the driveway. It turned out to be ideal for my needs. Within a mile of my house the Petawawa River joined the Ottawa. Exploring was pure joy. Launching at “The Point” one evening, I turned
upstream and nosed into the Petawawa. Here was a magnificent pool. Its flow squeezed between bastions of granite before gliding into the Ottawa. I dropped anchor near the head of the pool and lowered my baited jig. The first hit came quickly, and I was into something other than a pickerel. After boring strongly into the current, a four-pound catfish came to the net. It was the first of many that I would catch in that enticing pool, and some of them ran to double figures. And then one evening, in early fall, the pool went
quiet. I tried all manner of lures, but finally put a dead minnow on a simple weighted line. It was getting dark when I felt a light “tap-tap” and struck into something solid. It was a sunken log, surely. But no, it edged upstream, then settled back. I tried pumping, but it simply put its nose down into the current, and stayed there, sullen. Without warning, it turned and ran, fast, to the end of the pool, smoking my small Mitchell. Approaching the shore, the fish turned, heaving a great swirl on the surface, and then eased back to its comfort zone under the boat. It would not budge. I should have pulled the anchor, and drifted to quieter water. Should have, should have. Then that sinking feeling anglers dread: the line went slack. It did not break; the hook just came away. Whatever it was, it was on for almost an hour, but never revealed its identity. Fast forward almost half a century. I am jetting
Canada’s Confederation
Fish By DOUG POLLARD 36 BOUNDER MAGAZINE
along the Fraser River, not by plane, but by boat. I have reached my three-quarter century. My son Adrian and daughter Sue have arranged a fishing trip in celebration. We are looking for sturgeon. During the pre-dawn drive to Mission, Sue recalled how, as a child, she swam the rapids of the Petawawa, just to watch sturgeon. And a penny drops. My monster fish of decades ago...was that a sturgeon? Delighted to hear we had our tidal, as well as
freshwater licences, our guide headed downstream to the “nursery” where sturgeon are numerous but small. Yves would show us how to distinguish a sturgeon’s bite from the nibbles of lesser denizens. We learned how to read an electronic tag embedded under the sturgeon’s skin, and to insert a tag if it did not have one. Tagging is very important to biologists trying to help sturgeon recover from overfishing, habitat damage, and catastrophic disruption of rivers. We were fishing for
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