THE LAND NORTH OF SUPERIOR

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In the great place we call northern Ontario it pays to be lucky.  The day of the electronic instrument however is exploding all across the land north of Superior.

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A fantastic late June day found me sweating under my hardtop camper changing tires.  We were only eight miles or so from our lake destination when the trailer swayed behind me.  Immediately I pulled over, I knew I had blown another of those pesky twelve-inch camper tires.  The bugs came out to feast as I crawled under the camper with my power bar loosening the four bolts.  Two weeks before would have been horrendous with the bugs, I had been fishing here then too.  The tire finally lay on the ground and I crawled out from under the camper.  The spare bolted to the back of the camper didn’t bounce when I dropped it on the ground.  A soft tire.  Yesterday I would have cursed up a blue streak.  Today on the way past our local hardware store on impulse I had stopped and invested the princely sum of thirty dollars for one of those new twelve-volt electric air pumps. Lucky?  You betcha!

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Two minutes of electric purr had the soft tire up to the seventy pounds recommended by the trailer manufacturer.  Ten minutes after that we were back on the road again.  Everyone else, except me, seemed to have been refreshed by the unplanned stop. 

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We were just rocking when we pulled up to our campsite.  Wife kids and dog all piled out of the truck and our week of pickeral fishing was about to start.  Everyone even the youngest at six had some part into the camper set up and getting the boat off the top of the supercab.  In total only about forty minutes passed before I was tying the final cord to the blue tarp that protected our cook table from adverse elements.

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With cigerello in hand and a cup of fresh coffee on the table beside me, I was feeling just great.  I was about to say that it was great there was nobody else here when we heard the growl from Ace.  Some one was coming.  Sure enough in due time a ¾ ton truck with a huge camper on top and a boat behind pulled up.  Friendly waves were exchanged as the father backed the boat trailer into the water and unloaded the boat.  The boat trailer was left off to the side as the truck was levelled off.

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The guy, his fictional name, Tom, came over.  We chatted fishing for a short as he sampled some coffee.  They were from Wisconsin and would stay four days before they moved onto another lake.  Thanking the wife for the coffee he said he was going to look the lake over with his kids before they went fishing that evening.

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I told my crew to watch as tom powered up started down the right hand shoreline.  He’s going to stop there, there and there to look around.  How was I so sure this would happen?  Rather easy, Tom was obviously an outdoors type and he had a fish finder on board.  He would see the bottom structure at those points and want to investigate a little more.  Sure enough he did circle all three underwater humps and must have noted the activity underwater on his screen.  It had taken me four years of bottom bouncing lures, and losing many of them to find those humps.  It had taken him twenty minutes.

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Later that evening Tom and family went fishing and did really well for never having been on this lake before.  Tom and company left friends four days later as they continued a six lake month long holiday.

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The question that kept bothering me was this, should electronics be allowed on a lake under a certain size?  Everybody is an expert the first time on a given body of water.  Nobody needs to pay their dues and have no success or low success on a lake as you slowly learned where the fish were.  With electronics the worst fisherman/lady has a more than reasonable chance of limiting out the first time on a lake.  Fishing pressure just went up astronomically.  Small lakes have a very finite number of fish in them to start. Now enter electronics and you find the preferred location of a species and you are automatically targeting the largest fish in the system.  These same large fish are the prime producers of young, both in numbers and size.  I believe that genetically big fish produce big fish, the same as people.  It can happen that five-foot parents can have a six-foot son, but what are the chances.

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I use electronics now-a-days myself.  On bigger lakes they are invaluable, as well as deep lake trout lakes where you need to fish bottom.  Yes people will argue that electronics don’t make fish bite, very true.  But if you drag you bait in fishy territory all the time you will catch more than if you inadvertently fish empty water without sonar.  Your choice.

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If every one fishing would remember the new four fish limit, and the shore lunch included in this limit we need to do one other thing to keep the fishery healthy.  We have to put the big fish back to spawn another year. We want to see the land north of Superior passed on to the next generations in hopefully better shape than we found it.