THE LAND NORTH OF SUPERIOR<o:p></o:p>

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When faced with a need people will come up with the answer is just another way to say necessity is the Mother of Invention.  When one looks back at life how much is really new, how much has in fact seen the light of day before the invention was heralded in the land north of Superior?

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Those were the good old days; we were young and full of ambition and dreams.  We were

 driven by the newness of most things and still not grown weary of anything from lack of change.  My brother and I spent most of that summer out at our brand new summer camp.  It had been virgin forest when we had started to mark out and hack a road into the pine covered shoreline of what would be our summer camp for years to come.  The work was heavy and the summer days were hot as we felled trees, delimbed them, and made twin piles at designated places.  One pile of tree branches and scrubs would be burnt in the very early spring the next year, the other would be bucked, split and repiled and burnt through out the year as fire wood for Mom’s cast iron cook stove.

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Summer days settled into a routine as the roadwork and the work of clearing the land for the camp buildings.  A small ‘shack�?destined to be a tool shed/spare bedroom was the first building up.  Mom and Dad and our two younger sisters slept there.  My brother and I lived in a 9X9 canvas tent and were in heaven.  The only day that didn’t really set well with us was the weekly sweeping out of our quarters.  To ensure proper cleaning and airing of sleeping bags Mom would pull up a lawn chair and pull out her knitting box.  She could lay rows on rows of different loops and swirls without missing a single move we made.  Mittens and scarves and toques for winter were followed by the warmest thick winter socks my feet have ever known were created by those knowing hands.  To ensure that there would be no confusion a number of colours were always used to create these articles.<o:p></o:p>

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We didn’t really have any money in those days.  All we had was a small icecream allowance and everything we needed was purchased by our parents, if we really needed it.  The one thing that we were always in need of was fishing tackle.  The inexperience of youth was a constant drain on the small green tackle box, which held the basics of fishing tackle.  A few spinners, a lot of hooks in various sizes and the ultimate in those days the Nipigon River Cockatush, a wet fly in different colours behind a big silver or copper coloured Colorado Spinner.  The pickeral that came into our lake every year from Lake Superior in June loved the Cockatush, especially the bright, blood red fly version.  When we trolled the shorelines of our lake we invariably used the red n whites as we came to call Dan Gappen’s invention.<o:p></o:p>

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I don’t recall how much these lures cost, I do remember that the toothy pickeral and pike would shred the fly portion in a small number of days.  Once that happened we were encouraged to use the spinner hook combination left with a fat night crawler or two and still get results, walleye in the pan or the smoker.  <o:p></o:p>

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Now using crawlers has two basic drawbacks.  One they must be harvested from the lawns of our neighbourhood and that was long hours of painstaking stealthy inching over wet lawns with a flashlight.  The other draw back was that the hook needed rebaiting after every failed strike and often after having the dew worm cluster ripped of by being dragged through the weed beds or over bottom structure.<o:p></o:p>

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To this day my brother and I can’t agree on who came up with the solution for our problem.  It was on one of those tent cleaning days.  Mom was doing her knitting in her lawn chair.  She was making something with a bright red and a white yarn for the girls.  As we slowly emptied out the tent and hung sleeping bags on lines to air, we came on this spinner.  The red n white was in sorry shape, the binding wraps had been cut and the two feathers were laying side by each extended from the U of the hook.  Something, somewhere made a connection.  The red n white in question still caught fish, we had brought it into the tent in order to rewrap the fly.  But now an alternative presented itself.<o:p></o:p>

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Mom and Dad with the girls were barely around the first corner or the road headed home to do laundry and get supplies like butter, milk and ice for our cooler when we were in her knitting box.  The yarn balls of the red and white yarn were considerably smaller by the time we had recreated over a dozen ‘new red n whites�?   We couldn’t get the white to stand out from the red body like feathers would so we took a number of yarn pieces and just laid them on the hook shank and wrapped them in place with black thread, also from the knitting box.  Knowing nothing of glues for fly tying we would do a number of wraps with the thread pass it through the hook eye and again a number of wraps followed by another pass through the eye to hold the yarn in place so it would slide down to the U of the hook right of.<o:p></o:p>

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That summer we had invented yarn flies, long before they were popularized by the magic of television and the slickest tackle salesman ever, the host on a ‘fishing show�?  Mom’s knitting box took a beating that summer as we tried several and maybe all colour combinations out to attract those pickeral.  Some of these yarn flies where a good six inches long and were most successful drift fished with the wind when it blew along a shoreline.  <o:p></o:p>

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We ate a lot of fish that summer.  Mom’s knitting box kept on taking hits all summer.  It wasn’t until a good number of years later that I came to realise the there were a lot of different bright coloured yarns in that box in small balls, that never showed up as clothing for any of us.<o:p></o:p>

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As all memories this one was hidden for years and only brought back to the forefront as I watched a well known Canadian fish show host expound on the virtues of the ‘new�?yarn fly for the big northerns of this province of ours.  What else has been invented but never brought to market because it was so simple in this land north of Superior.