This week marks our annual family fishing trip to Canada. Strangely, it does not usually involve the entire family, nor do we go every year, but that’s what it is.
For years we have come up to Canada in pursuit of Kamloops trout which inhabit many of the lakes in interior British Columbia, and we almost always end up at the same fishing camp. This may be a puzzling aspect to some of you. What is a “fishing camp”? Well, try to imagine a remote wilderness, with a set of cabins and basic facilities in which you squeeze into for a few days to a week, while taking in the natural beauty of the world and sitting in a boat with a line in the water on one of the many lakes in the area. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you will even catch a fish. Shameless plug: http://www.meadowlakefishing.com/
I was eagerly checking my email for FSI session invites the first few days of this week. I had been on the Foreign Service Register for about 9 months at this point, and had all but given up on getting an invite to the September 17th FSI session which we knew had resulted in invites to some Diplomatic Security applicants. So, I had pushed this to the back of my mind and focused on catching fish. Our luck had resulted in 10 fine fishy specimens in the first two days of the week, and perhaps we’d try our luck at the elusive, yet alluring “wall fish”.
A wall fish was simply the tradition of the camp we had been visiting and is considered a fish in excess of 4 pounds (which is hefty for these trout!). Generally, there are around a dozen that are caught in any given season, and catching one would result in a bit of a celebration and commemoration of catching the unwitting fish. Of course, fish of this sort were difficult to hook, and require an arcane combination of know-how and luck. I had never caught one, and after we had collected some smaller fish (which we would call “smokers” for their deliciousness and application as a tasty treat after they had been smoked) we would shift or focus to lakes which produced larger trout in order to hook a big one and come away with tall fishing tale.
In any event, this meant that we were visiting a lake that, while being known for it’s larger fish, was often loathe to produce them, often resulting in coming home empty-handed (“skunked” in fishing terms). So, I settled into the boat and immersed myself into the audiobook I was enjoying at the time (Cormac McCarthys “Blood Meridian”), and spent the hours of the day fishing away.
Eventually, 6 PM rolled around – which marked the time we ought to consider packing it in and heading back to camp to enjoy a 7 o’clock meal. It hadn’t been a bad day. In fact, it had been uncharacteristically good, and we would be headed back with 3 fish in the 14-17 inch range, all of them quite fat. I elected to finish the chapter of the audiobook and head back in. I opted troll (row slowly with lines out) back over a particular spot that my father had identified as a “good place for fish to be” on my way out. It was at some point in the following minutes that I felt a rather substantial tug on one of my lines, to which I grabbed the rod and twitched the tip up to set the hook.
There was considerable resistance to this action on the other end of the line, so I knew the fight was on – and on it went, for over 10 minutes. The fish went long, it came close. It rose up out of the water, and dived down deep. I could see that it was no small fish by any means. It circled the boat multiple times, much like a shark – and finally just relied on it’s heft and gravity’s will to thwart my effort to bring it to heel. It was no small effort to balance just the right amount of tension on the line during all of this to ensure that the well-endowed fish did not snap the line entirely, but my efforts were rewarded when I was finally able to bring the exhausted fish to the surface and usher it into the net. It was by far the largest trout I had ever caught, and was beautiful (as far as fish go).
My father had already landed his