Hooked on the Big Hook

The only ones I really had worried during my week of fishing in Canada weren’t the fish in the lake — it was the people back at work here at the newspaper.

That was only after the middle of the week, when I e-mailed the office that I might not be able to get home by the following Monday and everyone who had been covering for me was afraid they’d have to do it even longer.

Terry and I spent a week at her brother and sister-in-law’s fly-in fishing resort in northern Ontario, Big Hook Wilderness Camps.

The fly-in is not some picturesque description. You literally drive to the end of the road — Ontario Provincial Road 502, to be exact — at Red Lake, then fly 185 air miles farther north to get to their place, first on a six- or eight-seat passenger plane, then on a float plane.

From a weather standpoint, this has been far from a picturesque summer for them this year. It had rained so much up there that some of the fish were in danger of drowning. They’d given up counting how many days it had been since they’d seen the sun — the number was too high, and too depressing, to comprehend.

We flew in on a cloudy Saturday, but the clouds soon disappeared and the first half of the week, at least, was sunny and warm, which suited us just fine.

But it was apparently too good to last, as the weather reports by the middle of the week were predicting a return to rain by Saturday — the day we were supposed to fly back to civilization.

Indeed, the weather report was for 50 millimeters of rain. That sounded like enough rain to put all of Ontario underwater — until you did the metric conversion. It was just less than two inches, which was still enough that it made flying out Saturday questionable.

That’s why I sent out the heads-up that we might be stuck in the wilderness for longer than we had originally anticipated.

The weather was still warm and sunny when I sent the e-mail, but that night, around 11 p.m., we were treated to a pretty spectacular thunderstorm that, albeit only a half hour long or so, had water coming in the windows of our cabin and both Terry and I figuring on getting in a few more days of fishing — or watching it rain.

The Saturday weather report remained unchanged for the rest of the week so, while we had everything packed Friday night for a Saturday departure, we were ready for a quick unpacking Saturday morning.

Saturday dawned cloudy but dry, so they began flying people out of the various camps. We were the last ones scheduled to go out, so we kept our fingers crossed and watched the sky.

There was still no rain when we left Big Hook or when we landed at Sandy Lake to change planes, but by the time we boarded the plane for Red Lake, the rain was coming down.

We were on what amounted to the local service, making two or three stops between Sandy Lake and Red Lake — although I would swear there was no place to stop in between those two places, but we did.

We got to Red Lake and picked up our car, then headed back home — in rain just about all the way, but on time. Apparently, the wet trip home was the price we paid for our week of (mostly) sunshine at Big Hook.

I think I’d like to know who it was here at the newspaper that had enough pull to get the rain in northern Ontario to hold off until we could fly out. I know it wasn’t because they were that eager to see me again — they were just tired of covering for me and didn’t want to do it one more day.

I do know the fish at Big Hook would have been glad to have me stick around a while longer — I was certainly less of a threat to them than most of the anglers who come through there.