Trip provides bounty of brook trout.
NORTHWESTERN ONTARIO The brook trout hit in circus fashion, it’s beefy body coming half out of the water as it grasped the gaudy dry fly.
As strikes go, it was right out of a fly anglers fantasy.
No sip or nudge, this. The fish engulfed the foam hopper with the subtlety of a bowling ball dropped from a streamside spruce.
Chris Hunt lifted his fly rod and was fast to the red-andblue spotted hulk. Five minutes later the brookie, estimated at six pounds in weight and 22 inches in length, was netted, unhooked, photographed and released.
“OK, I’m done!” Hunt said, a wide smile fixed on his face.
He wasn’t, of course, and neither was the rest of our group.
We’d only been fishing for 15 minutes on the first pool of what promised to be an 8-hour canoe and fishing adventure on the Albany River system in northwestern Ontario.
But Hunt, who has fished for trout on many of the best waters in the world, expressed the satisfied sentiments of an angler who had just caught the biggest wild, native brookie of his life.
By the end of the day, each of the other three members of our fishing party would be able to make the same claim.
The accomplishments were less a measure of angling ability and more about the high quality of the remote resource.
Quite simply, we were fishing in the best place on the planet for massive brook trout.
The region includes the Albany, Nipigon and Okogi river systems; the biggest brookie ever caught was a 14-pound-8-ounce fish landed in 1915 in the Nipigon River, according to records of the International Game Fish Association.
Thanks to the hard-to-reach waters and special regulations in some areas, northwestern Ontario continues to produce fish of a lifetime for anglers.
On a recent mid-summer day, that was true for our group, which included: Hunt, 48, national editorial director for Trout Media, a division of Trout Unlimited, who lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho; Matt Reilly, 21, a college student and freelance writer and photographer who lives in Charlottesville, Va.; Mark Taylor, 51, eastern communications director for Trout Unlimited who lives in Roanoke, Va.; and me.
Hunt, Reilly, Taylor and I are members of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. Following the 2017 OWAA conference in Duluth, Minn., we headed into the wilds of Ontario for an angling adventure.
Over the course of four days, we stayed at two lodges operated by Wilderness North, a fly-in fishing company based in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
The first part of our trip was focused on northern pike and walleye fishing at Striker’s Bay Lodge on Whitewater Lake, a 26,000-acre natural enlargement of the Ogoki River.
The second was highlighted by brook trout fishing near Miminiska Lodge on the Albany River system.
Miminiska sits amidst Canada’s boreal forest, a sprawling region featuring thick stands of spruce, birch, fir, and willow as well as bogs, rivers and lakes.
My path here can be traced to John “Jack” Marks of Oshkosh.
Marks grew up on the south side of Milwaukee with a penchant to fly. He fulfilled that dream and served his country as an aviator in World War II and the Korean War.
Many years later, during a successful business career, he found, purchased and restored the P-51 Mustang he had flown during service.
As a civilian pilot he turned his sights north into the wild reaches of Canada. After years of float plane excursions, Marks founded Wilderness North in 1990 to help others experience the beauty of northwestern Ontario.
Marks died in 2007; the company is now owned and operated by Alan and Krista Cheeseman of Thunder Bay.
Our brook trout fishing excursion typified the lodge’s unique, even exotic, offerings.
After a hot breakfast in Miminiska’s timber frame lodge, we boarded the company’s DeHavilland Beaver for a 10-minute flight to an upstream portion of the Albany.
Two canoes were lashed to the pontoons. In this part of the world, float planes move people and cargo on a regular basis.
From the air, we could see a seemingly endless matrix of lakes linked by ribbons of water. It's here, in the streams between the wide spots, that brook trout are found in highest numbers.
Our group of four was guided by Joe Boyce, 49, and Keith Missewace, 21, both natives of the area and members of the Fort Hope Band of Ojibway.
“This river will bring you happy times,” said Boyce, who has worked as a fishing guide since he was 16.
Our anticipation spiked as we spied brook trout zig-zagging beneath the canoes in still stretches.
We reached the first rocky run and pool after 20 minutes on the river. We beached the paddle boats and clambered out to wade and cast.
On one of Hunt’s first casts, he had an aggressive take on a hopper. The fish broke off, though, after a few seconds.
Reilly then hooked and landed a brookie on the dry fly; the fish was beautifully colored and about 17 inches in length.
Hunt retied and then landed the six-pound fish. The topwater approach also put a fish in the net for Taylor at the first stop.
We experimented with flies during the rest of the day, but under overcast skies, the brookies enthusiastically hit hoppers for the next eight hours.
Brookies, also called specks, square-tails and speckled trout, hold a special place in the pantheon of North American fish species for many reasons. In addition to being the only trout native to the eastern U.S., they are spectacularly beautiful, with orange bellies and red and blue spotted sides.
Further, brook trout require clean, cold water, an increasingly rare resource, and their populations have been threatened by introduced species, including brown trout.
For the four of us, to angle for brook trout in unspoiled waters in the species' native range, and catch them on surface presentations, was a dream come true.
“My heart is racing,” Hunt said after releasing yet another big trout.
The ecological health of the system was evident in the bug life: Droves of dragonfly larvae crawled onto stream side vegetation, caddisflies skittered across the water, mayflies flitted in the air and a few stoneflies drifted past on the current.
We encountered no other human anglers on the river. The avian varieties were well represented, however, by bald eagles and common goldeneyes.
The brook trout were present in sizes and numbers that prompted frequent comparisons.
“The width of the tail on these fish is bigger than the average length of brook trout in the Shenandoah,” Reilly said.
Taylor said the plump trout were unlike any he'd ever seen.
"These are built like bruiser smallmouth bass," Taylor said.
Once hooked, the brookies had a habit of head-shaking and bull-dogging into the deepest part of the pools.
We used barbless hooks or flies that had the barbs pinched down. On several occasions we lost big trout after a minute of throbbing tension as fish became unbuttoned.
In keeping with our own practices and Wilderness North policy, all brookies landed were released.
We didn’t measure or weigh a fish, preferring to get them back in the water as quickly as possible. But we estimated the average size of the dozens of brookies we caught was 17 inches and 3 pounds.
“Who gets to catch and hold fish like that?” Hunt said as we reflected on the day in which each of us had experienced the best best brook trout fishing of our lives. “We were seriously lucky.”