The Fishing Thread

I've fly fished the Eastern Slopes in Southern Alberta most of my adult life. I started in Waterton Lakes Park near the Montana border and worked my way north along the Forest Trunk Road to Jasper. I've caught everything from trout to pike, to white fish, to grayling on flies, streamers, and nymphs. My grandpa used to take me fishing on the Waterton River when I was just a grub, using just a split shot and maggot on a snelled hook. He also had this ancient 14 foot split cane fly rod with a wind up spring retracting reel. I've tried to figure out the make going just from memory, but it's beyond my abilities. But I've seen what Orvis split canes are worth, and I'm pretty confident that today it would be worth a small fortune.




The West Castle River near Beaver Mines Lake. It recently became a nature preserve so everything is catch and release. Since then it started to produce some decent cutthroat; one of few natural cutthroat stocks left.






Bathing Lake near Pectin. It's a put and take pond you can cast across; but springs in the middle mean it doesn't winter kill so it produces some good-sized rainbows. I caught this one just off the beaver dam in the middle, but I've caught up to 6 pound trout here.

It's probably safer than most kinds of hunting. Bullets don't travel very far at all under water.

Dr.Retarded said:

Man, that's awesome. I would have loved growing up with that type of country available. Grew up in the South, but it has its own charm and opportunities.

Do you have any pics of your grandfathers rod? Sounds like a big spey rod. Just curious what it looks like, and I'd imagine it's a hefty beast.

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Unfortunately Grandpa died in the mid 80s and everything is long gone. I know in Europe the long split cane rods were mostly used for salmon, often without a reel -- just line tied to the tip -- but this one had eyes and a reel seat, and broke into four pieces. I only remember seeing it a few times when I was quite young. He used to carve and paint his own rapalas for pike, and there was the skull of a 50 pounder he caught mounted over the door to his garage. He also held the record for the largest lake trout caught in Waterton Lake -- 49.5 pounds. It hung in the visitor's center until it burnt down a couple years ago in a forest fire.

He had an uncanny knack for reading water. He would give me the rod and point to a spot in the river and say, "Put it right there and let it drift down past that rock. If you see the line twitch give it a yank." I'd hook something almost every time.

Grandpa was a fine country gentleman in the old tradition. He lived his entire life in a two story log cabin he built with his father in the early 1900s. He hunted and fished and grew a giant garden, which fed 10 children. For most of his life he ran a trap line on Lee Creek between Beazer and the Montana border during the winter and logged the Castle area to make mine props for Leitch Colliery during the summer. After he died my uncle took over the trap line and ran it up to about 10 years ago when he died. He was teaching a local teenager how to do it and now he traps the line; it's shame none of my cousins were interested in doing it. My mom would tell stories about summer camp and dragging timber down Carbondale Ridge to the saw mill with a team of horses. She told of a different era: remembered round trips from Hillspring to Lethbridge when she was a young girl taking almost two weeks by wagon (80 miles one way); how they got electricity in the 40s when the village installed a generator -- which ran two hours a day (they could take those giant old cylinder batteries to the generator shack and leave them to get recharged); how they dug a pit and lined it with straw so they could cut ice blocks in the winter and have ice for the ice box all summer.

But I'm rambling. I wish I knew more about grandpa's fly rod; just finding this thread triggered memories about simpler times. I've converted a Dodge Caravan into a camper unit with a house battery and laptop station, and I plan on traveling around to different fishing spots when it gets safe to travel again. If and when I'll post some pix.