The Summer's Tales

It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous--almost of pedantic--veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.

--Jerome K. Jerome

Summer waxed strong across Canada last week and garrulous anglers were telling new fictions to prove an old fact about fishing. Samples:

P: Ray Turner, a Fort William policeman, was patrolling his beat on the Lake Superior waterfront when the propeller of a passing ship stunned a fish and knocked it to the surface. A seagull swooped down, grabbed the fish, then dropped it on the dockside at Turner's feet. It was a 2 1/2-lb. pickerel.

P: William Bauer of Kingston, Ont. caught a 32-inch pike, but that was not all. Inside the pike was a large-mouthed bass, inside the bass a perch and inside the perch a minnow. Paul Maki of Port Arthur pulled a 2-lb. pickerel from Black Sturgeon Lake with a 3-lb. pike gripping the pickerel's tail.

P: In Halifax Harbor, George Chaisson reeled in after two hours without a bite. On his hook was a soggy $5 bill.

P: Tourist camp operators on Northern Ontario's Muskellunge Lake complained that a giant fish (estimated weight: 40 Ibs.) was ruining business. The monster reared out of the water, shaking his head and rattling the assortment of fishermen's plugs and hooks broken off in his jaws. The noise, it seemed, was frightening tenderfoot fishermen off the lake.

P: A fisherman in Port Arthur, Ont. claimed a double strike on his two-hook line. A fish grabbed one hook, a bat gobbled the other. The intrepid angler landed both fish & foul.

P: While eating lunch on Manitoba's Brereton Lake, Jim Turner of Winnipeg let an orange slip overboard. Before he could recover it the fruit disappeared. A few minutes later, Turner heard a violent threshing in the reeds near shore, rowed over and gaffed a northern pike that was slowly choking to death with an orange stuck in its throat.

P: Camille Fournier of Quebec City hooked the biggest trout in his life in the Jacques Cartier River. He yanked too hard. Fish and line flew through the air and tangled in the antlers of a moose peering out of the trees; the moose dashed off with Fournier's prize.

P: Jim Catt of Saint John, N.B. went fishing on the Miramichi River, where salmon are so numerous and eager that they have been known to attack a man wearing a bright necktie with a design of hand-painted trout flies. Catt had just settled down to fish when a white-bearded old man came along, spoke sadly of his yearning to catch one last salmon and asked to borrow the rod & line. Catt had barely handed over the tackle when a fighting salmon shot out of the water, twisting & turning the line around the old man's whiskers. Quick-thinking Catt drew out a hunting knife, began to cut off the old man's beard. A meddlesome passerby, thinking that Catt was trying to cut the old man's throat, dashed up to attack Catt. The salmon escaped in the melee. Catt and the oldtimer were inconsolable. Moaned Catt: "I knew he'd rather lose his whiskers than his last fish."

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