Algonquin 1997
Helena, Julian and I had a great trip in Algonquin. It is beautiful there in the spring. The weather was cool, but we have good equipment and cloths so we were nice and warm. Helena got cold at night, but she always does, even in summer.
The seasons are about three or four weeks behind Toronto up there. There weren't even buds on the trees. On our first morning it snowed like crazy for about twenty minutes. You would think that people who had just been through a long winter would have been perturbed, but it was beautiful seeing sheets of snow blowing across the lake as we sat around the campfire eating breakfast.
When we got to our destination at Big Porcupine Lake (I think this is the lake that Archie Belamy a.k.a. Grey Owl was arrested on when he tried to cross the Park in defiance of the law.) it was very windy. We had to stay around the shore to fish. After two days of fishing we had not gotten a bite! It was very discouraging. I thought we would be limiting out each day and eating lots of fresh fish. It is a beautiful lake though and we didn't regret being there.
We decided to head to Ragged Lake (The lake Grey Owl went through the ice when he tried to escape?) the day before we had to head home. Just before the portage Helena caught a Brook Trout. We kept trolling over the area that she caught it, and kept getting strikes, but couldn't hook up. They must have been very small.
Then we did the portage to Ragged Lake. The stream that runs between the lakes was very high. I took two casts into the mouth of it, but not having much faith in Ragged Lake as a good place for fish, (I thought it was a shallow lake, having been created by a dam about one hundred years ago. I thought a shallow lake would be unable to support a good trout population. Trout need deep water.) I hiked up the stream looking for a deep pool that some Big Porcupine trout might have made there way to. When I got back Julian had the biggest Brook Trout that I have ever seen! He caught it right in the mouth of the stream where I was fishing! Goes to show what I know. I took a few casts into the mouth and got myself a beautiful Brook Trout.
That night we feasted on trout and Kraft Dinner. The two smaller trout fed us well. I found a cliff at the edge of the lake that was covered in ice and used my hatchet to chip enough away to freeze the big trout. We ate it for dinner a few days later. I cooked it on the Bar-B-Q. Delicious!
We camped a few hundred meters from the portage so we just had a short jaunt out to Smoke Lake the next morning. We left early and as I paddled to the portage Helena put a line out. Would you believe, in that short distance Helena caught a big Lake Trout. It was a real tussle getting it into the boat.
When we got back to the van we went to the new Algonquin Visitor Center. Nice but kind of ho-hum after actually being in the Park.
