Roasted bass with basil pesto and garlic breadcrumbs

July 22, 2012

 

 

 

Bet found the recipe in Fine Cooking #66, August, 2004, p. 42.  She substituted recently-caught frozen largemouth bass fillets for the recommended cod.

The result was a delight to the senses, though it didn’t take long to finish the entre.

In my opinion this is the best way to serve bass that I have found in fifty or more years of looking.

UPDATE, 4 AUGUST, 2012:

Andre Mallet brought us a box of cod fillets from Halifax, so Bet tried the basil recipe with the recommended species. The entre was good, but we both preferred the bass. Both bunches of fillets had been frozen, though the largemouths were thicker, juicier, and their taste came through more effectively than did the cod.

Maybe local bass aren’t so bad, after all.

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Princecraft Starfish DLX SC Review #1: Why I gave up my old boat

June 17, 2012

For many years I have fished with considerable success from the bow of a 1982 Springbok 16’ equipped with a 35 Mercury two cycle outboard and a 30 lb. thrust MotorGuide trolling motor.

Built by Alcan in the early eighties as a response to the boom in fiberglass bass boats, this hull is still in perfect condition, though I had to rebuild the decks when I bought it twelve years ago. The carpet had rotted the originals, and the second deck wasn’t well done. I spent evenings over a winter building new fir plywood panels, rounding the edges, then glassing each piece to the standard I applied to the same job years earlier on my antique cabin cruiser. This was a surprisingly expensive and time-consuming job – especially eliminating the voids in the plywood around the hatch openings — but it provided a weatherproof deck for a boat which would spend half of the year tied to a dock and exposed to sun and weather.

Time took a toll on a series of swivel seats, but they were easily replaced through trips to Walmart or Princess Auto for new ones. The front live well holds only ten gallons, but it has kept many, many bass in good health, and because it is mounted to the port side I used it to trim the hull when I was in the boat alone. The rear live well is huge, but because it is located at the aft starboard corner of the vessel, it isn’t usable because it ruins the boat’s weight distribution. I stored life jackets in it.

At 60” at the widest point, the Springbok was too narrow for me at this time of life. While the boat was remarkably efficient on fuel, and even though it routinely outran the other boats in the fleet, the Springbok demanded of its operator and passengers the balance and co-ordination of a canoeist.

So my friends and family put increasing pressure on me to upgrade. Apparently the sight of a heavy, arthritic geezer perched on that narrow bow platform disturbed the serenity of others, (especially when this boat beat all comers in last year’s bass tournament).

A month of obsessive Internet searches and wild-goose chases occurred in pursuit of a wider boat. Every potential candidate I viewed was in much worse condition than the Springbok. Any idea how ratty that old blue carpet looks after twenty or thirty years, and how those rotten floorboards smell?

My search for a restorable hulk took me to Dave Brown’s establishment in Chaffey’s Locks, where I found no promising wreck, but spotted a bright red Princecraft, still without a motor, on his lot. Tentatively I asked Dave for a price. He vanished upstairs and returned in a few minutes with a printed page containing a graphic of the boat and a price not much greater than what I had been thinking of paying for a used glass centre-console on Kijiji.

“How much is the motor?”

“The 40 hp Mercury 4 stroke with EFI and tilt is included in the package.”

I don’t recall saying anything at that point. Numbers were racing around in my head, but I spent a good deal of time looking over the hull.

The thing that grabbed my attention first was the floorboards. Covered with a textured vinyl, they fasten down with exposed, stainless steel screws. The biggest problem I had with the Springbok’s glass deck was my unsuccessful attempt to build a coping which would join the deck to the aluminum sides. The walnut moulding on which I lavished hours wouldn’t stay on when the hull flexed in a chop. That loose coping remained my biggest disappointment with the rebuild of the boat.

Princecraft designers solved the same problem by creating a bead of the vinyl flooring material and sliding it between the floorboards and the hull sides, a simple and elegant solution which had eluded me over many hours of trying. (After a look at the new boat I thought I could fix the trim on the old one, and I did. I hope the new owner enjoys the old girl as much as I did.)

The new hatches are aluminum, also covered with vinyl. The latches look primitive, but seem to work well, won’t break from a misstep, and won’t trip anyone.

The swivel seats are comfortable and quite elegant in comparison to the Spartan ones which tormented my back for the last couple of years in the Springbok until I replaced them a month ago. On a first look the large seats seem to be placed too close together. The port seat looks as though it should be set to the left about three inches to balance the boat. Turns out that’s an illusion. As I discovered on the shakedown runs, the seats make optimal use of the hull’s width just the way they are.

There’s not much storage space in the new boat. Gas tank, battery box and pumps are exposed. The stern side bulkheads enclose foam only. The 7’ rod locker is just about it, if like me you plan to use the live well for fish and the forward locker for a battery. But I soon discovered that the side console (under the steering wheel) is much deeper than on the old one (I had to crawl in there after my wallet) and it’s the logical repository for a stack of life jackets.

The transom’s 71” wide and 20” high, so the light boat can take a 40 hp motor. With a butt that wide it will need it, too.

I asked Dave to order a matching “bicycle seat” to mount on a tall post at the bow. This should provide a more comfortable fishing position because I can either perch on it or use it as a brace while standing.

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The second annual Possum Lodge bass tournament

September 11, 2011

As Sir Paul McCartney once famously said, “Merely to succeed is not enough.  Others must fail.”  Hosts Tony Izatt and Anne DesLauriers must have had this in mind when holding the event during a full moon.  They couldn’t have foreseen the stiff northerly wind, though.

Tony had scheduled the thing to begin at 7:00 a.m.  What fish is awake at such a ghastly hour?

So there we were around the gas dock at Indian Lake Marina at the crack of dawn, waiting for the only sane members of the crew, Jeff and Greg, who had apparently slept in.  Eventually they came slumping down the dock.  We were a motley crew, but the fishing tackle was good.

As the designated “ringer” for this event I realized that my duty was to bring my particular skill to the tournament: the ability to make the fish stop biting whenever there is any pressure of any kind for the anglers to perform on cue.

So I dialed up CONSERVATION mode as Les Parrott, unsuspecting, joined me in the boat.  The others apparently decided their best bet was to get as far from me and my jinx as possible, for at the start they all blasted off to various points of the compass.  I moved over to A-dock on the trolling motor and began to cast.  Fishing in the morning is best off A-dock.

Surely enough, a chunky largemouth waited for my worm, immune to my jinx.  I stored him in the live well for his own protection.

Then we fished our way around Indian Lake.  Lovely body of water.  Perfectly fishless this morning, as well, until Les found another largemouth just off the Pagoda which had apparently missed the memo.

Hiding from the wind, we worked our way up Indian, across Mosquito (fish very well protected there by the jinx) and into Pollywog Lake.  Pollywog bass are notoriously independent and a bit suicidal, if provoked.  Most of the belligerent ones tore our bait off the hook and tangled us in weeds, but a couple of the unlucky ones ended up in the well.

Then we moved through Bedore’s Creek onto Newboro Lake and the jinx cut in with full force.  We cruised around more exquisitely clear water, cast a variety of choice weed patches, and had a few strikes best characterized by their inaccuracy.  Some occurred as much as 3′ from the actual bait.  According to Les these strikes say: “Get out of here and leave me alone!”

But no Newboro Lake bass were unfortunate enough to land in the live well.  My jinx seemed to work well enough on the north side of Scott Island.

To put it to the test we moved over to the bay known as “The Boathouse”.  Tony and Jeff were already there, straining the weeds frantically with long, looping casts.  Tony tried to wave me out of there, but  I lobbed a cast under a tree on the outskirts of the bay.  A solid largemouth took the worm, fought valiantly for a while, then tossed the hook back past my ear.

“I’ll bet that just cost us some money,” I muttered to Les.  The jinx continued.  An inaccurate cast under another tree led to a missed strike and a lost worm, then I took into a run of tangles in trees which led to the exploration of a lot of overhanging limbs while I removed a series of hooks from branches.

Back at the dock Tony conducted weigh-ins with a large plastic pail and digital scale.  Things proceeded normally until a protest from the group forced the host to drain the water out of the pail in which he was weighing his team’s catch, reducing the weight from 22 pounds to seven.

Turns out my jinx had been pretty effective after all.  The five bass we had put into the well for safekeeping weighed a total of 9.9 pounds and turned out to be the catch of the day, beating the entry of Morgan Pickering and Brad Wilson by a half-pound.  The fat laggard from under A-dock at 2.8 pounds won the largest fish by a couple of ounces, as well.

So Les and I faced some baleful glares, but we got to hold the Bob Steele Memorial Trophy for photos and have the right to display it in our homes for the winter.

Maybe I’d better ease up on the jinx next year because a passing cottager complained that the mouth of every bass on Newboro Lake seemed to be sealed up Saturday morning.

Host Tony Izatt presents Bob Steele Memorial Trophy

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The Bass Boat

September 8, 2009

When the first bass boats appeared on the Rideau we guys in the cedar strips and Wykes boats didn’t know what to think. They travelled around at ghastly speeds, but didn’t seem to create a hazard for other fishermen except for those who didn’t have their running lights installed. The big surprise was the way they threw very little wake at planning speeds, unlike the cruisers and large runabouts which were the bane of our existence.

The engines seemed excessive and the fuel cost for a day’s fishing didn’t make a lot of sense on small lakes like those around Chaffey’s Locks, but everybody admired the way the electric motors on the front allowed the boats to move around obstacles quietly and with great control.

For control is the whole game when fishing bass in shallow water. Pinpoint accuracy in casting comes only if the boat is in proper position and stays there until the cast is complete. A shadow will ruin an otherwise promising cast. Noise in the water causes the bass to stop biting for several minutes.

Oars are pretty good for moving a boat through weeds and around stumps and over- hanging trees, but the guys with the trolling motors were doing well, too.

Then a fellow from the States hired me to guide him on his 17’ bass boat for a few days in August. Ahah! Now I’d get a chance to see what these things could really do! I leaped at the chance and left my cedar strip tied to the dock. Perhaps I leaped a little too slowly, for on my first attempt to board my client’s boat the bow of the thing swung out from under me and I landed ass-first in the drink. Not a good way to start a day of fishing on a cool August morning.

We left Dorothy’s dock and locked down through onto Opinicon. All was well, though the lock guys ribbed me a bit about my early swim. Word travels fast in Chaffey’s. But then Ken cleared the channel and hit the throttle. 175 horsepower moves a small fiberglass boat fast enough to fold your eyelids back. I discovered that almost immediately. A few seconds later I was frozen. Man, can it get cold in August when you’re wet! Fortunately another few seconds and we had arrived at our destination, Deadlock Bay. The Deadlock is one of the trickiest places to control a boat I knew at the time, and I was determined to give the trolling motor a workout.

My favourite type of fishing at the time was to drag a dead frog over the large clumps of yellow weed which congeal on the surface in the Deadlock. Bass like to lurk underneath them and blast up through at baits dragged over the surface. These strikes are violent, exciting, and persistent: a good fish would keep a client amused for several minutes because the bass seldom connects on its first strike, and when it does get hold of the bait it often spits it out or rips it off the hook. In the dark under the weeds, the bass has no fear, and will strike again and again if the bait is presented properly.

This far-fetched approach to fishing makes for very entertaining sport for guests, and by the end of the day if I told them that a bass would bite at the foot of the oak tree six feet up on shore, most would take a cast or two just to be sure. The downside of fishing the slop, of course, is that the boat can easily become mired in the weeds. My guide boat weighed a few hundred pounds, and at times I couldn’t free it with the oars. I would have to blast out of the goop with the engine, the occasion of not a few bent propellers in the early years.

Fearlessly I glided my client’s bass boat into the weeds. Never having run a trolling motor before, I discovered this one had both 12V and 24V settings. Even on 12V it was pretty strong, and it had a lot of boat to move. If the plate on the side meant anything, the hull and engine weighed 2800 pounds. That’s a lot of boat.

Ken was an amateur tournament angler, so he didn’t need any instruction on casting. The first bass to strike up through the weeds rattled him a bit, though, and he missed the hook-set. “Put it right back in the same spot.”

“Really?”

“Yep. We often catch them on the fifth strike, third frog.”

Ken dropped another dead frog in exactly the same spot, no small achievement from thirty feet away. The bass inhaled it, and this time Ken was ready. “Get him up on top! Otherwise you can’t bring him in!” Ken valiantly yanked the bass up on top of the floating weeds, and then knew enough to skid it across the surface, not giving the fish a chance to nose back into the weeds. He brought a respectable two-pound bass to the boat.

For the rest of the morning we moved around the Deadlock casting at the patches of the yellow goo. Before long I had switched to 24 volts, but the motor resolutely chewed through the weeds.

We fished the week out. Ken caught more fish than he had in a lifetime of tournaments in Louisiana, and I developed a real respect for the bass boat. When it came time to build one, though, I used an old 16’ aluminum hull and a much smaller engine. The important part is the electric motor.

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Saturday evening on the Farm

July 25, 2009

7:15.  Mom’s birthday dinner’s over; Charlie’s back at work on his car;  Roz is buried in a book, studying for her big exam;  Mom and Bet are washing dishes.  I am sleepy after a day of mowing.  Solution?  Go fishing.

Up I went to the boat at its dock in Newboro to wet a line.  A quarter mile out I found some likely pads and caught a bass on my first cast.  Oops.  Isn’t that supposed to be a jinx?

Then I caught four more in short order, two over three pounds, the others around two.  I stopped at five because it was starting to rain a bit and I had run out of the weeds with easy fishing.  Of six patches, five had fish.

This was too easy.  I let them all go and  drove home, chuckling.  I’ll keep some fish that I have earned.  It was 7:55 when I walked into the house.  The kids and Bet were amused by my account of this bravura  performance.

It doesn’t get a whole lot better than this, when one can complete a fishing trip in forty minutes, front door and return,  and with excellent results.  I think we’re going to like it here.

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A man of bullheads, bass, and poetry

March 8, 2009

And as a boy I loved it.
The clear blue sky
Reflected in the shining surface
Of the lakes –
The old stone house,
Resplendent on the hill,
Our home.

It has been my pleasure recently to read Don Warren’s new book, The House on the Hill:  Recollections of a Rideau Canal Lockmaster’s son.  (Trafford, 2008).

The first section consists of Don’s memories from the twenties up to World War II.  The second is a sanitized version of his military experiences, and the volume concludes with a collection of poems he has written over the years.

The Lockmaster’s House at Chaffey’s Locks is very much at the centre of this book. At the end of a long wagon ride from Newboro in his seventh year, Don took one look at the big house on the hill and fell in love with it, ghosts and all.  As he gives a lively account of the exploration of his new home, I kept checking back to the photographs he included in the volume.  I hadn’t known about the footbridge across the spillway to the rear entrance of the Mill.  I wish I could have seen the eels tumbling through the current on their way to the Atlantic.

Don’s accounts of battles with Daisy the Cow and early skirmishes with Opinicon guests with sensitive noses make it evident that the young man will not turn out to be a farmer.  The campfire sing-alongs, practical jokes, outhouse mishaps and thefts from his mother’s garden provide a warm and amusing picture of life at the lockstation during the Great Depression.

Then, as now, a lockmaster must be an agent of the government.  Don recounts his father having to tell the Chaffey’s fishing guides that they could no longer camp on the property in order to make more space for visitors from the capital.  Don carries his father’s shame at this act of “democracy” to this day.

Understandably, some of the best sequences in the memoir concern fishing.  Don lists detailed instructions on the construction of a “bob” for fishing bullheads in early spring.   He offers a few tales of his guiding experiences, as well.  For the talented young fisherman largemouth bass were seldom a problem to catch, but he greatly admired the style and equipment of the wealthy clients who came to fish for them.

Don’s remarkably modest throughout the book, and this no doubt takes away from the military saga, Guys in Gaiters.  Like many who have signed the official secrets act, Don explained to me that he preferred to concentrate on the army hi-jinks rather than explain what he was actually doing outside Antwerp during the later stages of the war.  “If it seems as though I had a four-year vacation in Europe during the war, I guess that’s a chance I have to take, but I did get shot at four times during that interval.”

Not much detail of the action sneaks into his account, though one paragraph does mention being left behind at Ardenes, Holland as the Allied forces pulled back to avoid a full-on German attack.  Don explained, “What happened was that four or five of us were left behind to warn of any enemy attack by tanks.  The trouble was that they had to be within 3000 yards for us to intercept their wireless signals.  This meant we had to be left far behind the rest of our unit.”

A member of the 3 Canadian Special Service Company, Don trained in signals interception on the Isle of Man.  One paragraph mentions Don’s crew’s discovery of a coded German radio message which went out immediately before the firing of every V2 rocket.  This insight created quite a stir in intelligence circles because it provided the people of England with an early warning of each V2 attack. This reduced the threat of Hitler’s terror weapon.

But the best part of the book is the poetry.  Don presents a great variety of rhymes, ranging from the ribald antics of The Ballad of Peter Milan, to the timeless portrait Woman of War. But Don won’t hold a serious mood for long, so these give way to the driving rhythms and the lively wit of Lesson for Old Age Dodgers:

So pull up those aged pants
Give old ways a different slant
Take a lesson from the youngsters in the crowd

The reader must not miss The Ballad of Senator Bill.  It deals humorously with an accusation of indecent exposure at the Narrows Lock.  Canoeists are apparently a vengeful lot, and in the ballad Don makes shrewd use of the rumour mill to deal with their tormentor.

The poem Old Age shows the hell of sitting with boxes of multi-coloured pills, blear-eyed and aching, “with conversations centering on the dying and the dead.”  Nestled between those of his children, Don Warren’s home couldn’t be further from this drear scene.  With a brave little dog watching his every move, a flock of turkeys at his window, swans on the ice below and a bevy of songbirds in his garden, Don traces with coffee cups and all-nighters his progress through the next volume of his memoirs.  He’s in his eighty-ninth year.

Donald H. Warren.  The House on the Hill:  Recollections of a Rideau Canal Lockmaster’s son.  Trafford Publishing.  2008.  ISBN:  978-1-4251-6019-7

$17.00

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Why nobody will take Bet fishing (more than once)

February 6, 2009

Charlie put up on his website a few old photos he found around the house.  My favourite is one of a twenty-one year-old Bet, my bride, proudly holding a stringer of three fat largemouth bass.  That was the last time she fished for about twenty-five years.

It wasn’t until my pal Tony was bragging about his ability to hook a bass and he ran into Bet’s barbed wit that the subject came up:  “If you know so much about it, why don’t you ever fish?”

“Never mind,” I whispered.

Tony persisted:  “How about I set you up with a spinning rod – they’re really simple to use – and take you up onto Mosquito Lake this afternoon for an hour?”  Bet showed no real objection, so like an innocent Tony prepared the rod, the boat, and away they went.

I waited.  I knew what it would be like when they returned.  Yep.  There was Bet in the forward seat of  the Princecraft as they came in.  She was beaming.  Tony looked as if someone had stolen his favourite hat and stomped on it.  “So how did it go?”

“I got three nice ones,” Bet chirped.  “Tony didn’t get any.”  Bet was always a ruthless competitor when it came to fishing.  I winced.

Any one of the guys would have phrased the report as: “We kept three.”  This meant that between us we chose to keep only these three fish.  Others, the report implies, were released because they were too small, too large, or were lost.  We even learned to call the ones that got away “remote releases” to remove the sting of failure.

Tony groaned, “Does she ever miss a fish?”

“No,” I assured him.  “Bet’s a Leo, and I guess that means she has claws like a lion.  If a fish even nibbles at a bait on Bet’s line, it’s as good as dead.  She never fails to hook a fish.”

Tony and I and the other guys, of course, miss all kinds of bass.  It’s a running joke reporting that one or the other of us caught a largemouth on the fifth strike, third worm, or some such.  We even credit each other with assists.  You get an assist for first missing the fish, and then watching while your partner hooks and lands it.

This sort of sophistry is fun.  Putting a positive spin on our ineptitude is a big part of the bonding of fishing partners.  But not with Bet.  “She was at the front of the boat, right?”

“No, I was in the bow, running the trolling motor,  but she still made casts all around me, sometimes even in front of the boat, before I could get my bait into the spots,” Tony complained.

“I gather she didn’t have any trouble switching from bait casting to a spinning rod?”  On the dock before departure Tony had made a big deal of teaching Bet how to use a “proper” fishing rod.  Now he just glared at me.

“She didn’t leave a square foot of lily pads or a stump for me to fish, and I was in front of her, the whole time!”

“Now do you see why Bet doesn’t fish much?”  I asked.

“Yep.”

It was Labour Day, 1974.  Over the summer in an old canoe on Opinicon Lake I had recorded data on every bass I caught.  My goal was to hit the century mark before summer holidays ended.  That morning I had counted up ninety-eight fish.  All I needed were two more to reach my goal.  We dropped the canoe in at Chaffey’s and worked our way out the shoreline of Opinicon.

Bet soon retired her paddle and worked steadily with her spin-cast rig.  The artificial worm on a weedless hook slid easily under the overhanging trees as I methodically positioned the canoe for the best angle.  I hardly ever saw an opening to cast.  I almost hoped that maybe she would get a line tangle, or even hang up in a tree for a few minutes and give me a chance, but no:  every cast was either perfectly placed, or short of the mark and quickly retrieved.

Then in the space of six casts she landed three bass for a total weight of ten pounds.  Bet was jubilant at her success.  They were very nice fish, and she had handled them well.

But I needed two fish to meet my quota, and she wouldn’t stop casting.  What’s more, she ridiculed the one small bass I reeled in.  ‘Are you going to keep that poor little thing?  Why, it can’t be more than twelve or thirteen inches!’

As I recall my temper frayed sufficiently that I decided to transport my lovely, talented wife and her bass back to the dock before the fish grew stale.  Then I took the picture of this beautiful young woman and the fish which should have been mine.  That was the last fishing trip.

Bet went on to endure many summers in a leaky boat, my numerous half-completed do-it-yourself projects, and all of my dietary quirks.  She raised our son well, has had a fine career and put up with a series of neurotic spaniels.

After thirty-seven years I can’t imagine life without her, but we’re both smart enough not to try fishing together.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Bet.

bet-and-bass

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Opening Day

June 23, 2008

No date on the calendar holds as much significance to millions of North Americans as the opening of bass season.  It’s the day when summer really arrives, holidays begin, and fishing becomes serious — if only the bass would co-operate.  They’re notoriously tricky early in the season.

I’ll never forget the time I took my son Charlie with me to fish opening day on Opinicon.  He was about nine at the time.  We locked Wybmadiity II down through Chaffey’s Lock and anchored just outside the bay below the lock, planning to catch and cook as we went.

We had the dinghy on the transom.  Starting at sunrise, we rowed the bay, fishing every promising clump of weeds, casting every overhanging tree and stump, and all without a nibble.  As the sun rose high over the familiar water, Charlie was becoming discouraged, and I was running out of excuses for my failure as a guide.

Finally we returned to the mother ship in defeat.  As I scraped together an ignominious lunch of peanut butter and bread, Charlie sat down at the stern and dropped his line overboard.  The unexpected strike produced a fine dinner fish.  We ate it and decided to try the same trick again … and again, until we had caught and released a total of nine largemouth bass from directly under the boat. The sizes ran up to a very respectable five pounds.  There’s no accounting for the movements of opening-day bass.

So here are an ex-guide’s tips for success on opening day:

1.  This is the start of the real fishing season.  Remember how gently you had to handle those crappies and the occasional trout?  Forget it.  These are largemouths, and if you don’t set that hook HARD, they’ll throw it back at you.

2.  Get rid of that six-pound test line.  These are real fish, and you don’t want to lose a good one.  Check your knot and that of your companion.  More bass are lost to loose knots than any other error.

3.  Teach everyone in your boat to keep the floor silent, or else get used to fishing from the dock.  A scraped tackle box or a dropped lure, and you might as well start the motor and leave the area.  The bass just won’t bite until things have settled down.  Bare feet work best (unless you accidentally bring a northern pike aboard).

4.  The best bass fishing is close to shore, but don’t take the boat in close until you are sure your companions can control their casts, lest you spend the day fishing hooks out of the tops of cedar trees under the baleful gaze of property owners.

5.  Use single hooks, if possible.  This makes releasing fish much easier, and greatly cuts down on emergency room waits for fish-hook removal.  Weedless hooks work very well in bass cover on the Rideau, but again use heavy line.  I consider 20 lb. synthetic braided the minimum for fishing bass in heavy cover.

6.  Don’t forget:  in our district if a bass is shorter than one foot in length, back it goes, without exception.  You may keep six per full license, but it’s much cooler to come in with no more than four fish per boat.  Practice this:  “We kept these four.”  Say it again, proudly.  Good.

7.  For years my fishing pals have agreed not to keep any bass over three pounds.  Big bass are too large for kids and women of childbearing age to eat, and they are much more successful at raising their young than smaller fish.  By the end of spawning season a 13 inch male is thin and haggard, while a 21 inch largemouth looks as though it has actually put on weight.  It deals with nest raiders simply by eating them.

8.  Am I catching my share?  A study of the fishery in Lake Opinicon, Ont., (Lewis 1965) indicated that for guided parties  in July average rates of 0.5-0.3 fish per hour indicated good fishing. (Crossman and Scott, Freshwater Fishes of Canada, p. 739).

—————————————————————————————

Retired educator and writer Don Warren still delights in telling of that summer when Dr. Lewis hired him to row his guide boat into the sanctuary at the foot of Opinicon Lake and fill a washtub with bass each day for the Queen’s crew to study.

Years later Don taught me how to teach, but he didn’t consider the job finished until I became proficient in the ways of the largemouth bass, the creature which drives the economy of Chaffey’s Locks and surrounding communities.  That summer he rented me a canoe each evening, answered my questions and offered advice.  By the end of the summer I had the bass pretty well figured out.

Thirty years ago I calculated that, according to Dr. Lewis, two twelve or thirteen inch bass would keep an angler happy for a day of guided fishing.  The party would put, on average, about $250 per person into the local economy for that day.  Next time you look a bass in the face and decide whether to release it or drop it into the live well, ask yourself:  “Is this fish worth  $125. to me?”

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