Eyes wide shut

The dish was part Italian, part Canadian inspired: moose in white wine and mushroom sauce over a bed of fusilli. Exquisite. The company: a good crowd, mostly silent, eating. There were no candles and the wine was more brown and fizzy than fragrant and red but it suited the occasion well.

If I closed my eyes as I tasted another fork full of the moose pasta I could almost imagine sitting in a good restaurant. But for one too many appreciative belches and the satisfied grunts of well fed Canadian blokes. Chaz had done us proud, again.

The next time I closed my eyes it was to try and get to sleep in a little too close a proximity to the barber. There were over 20 of us in camp and the bunking arrangements had gone awry.

And the time after that; I was eyes tight shut praying for the rain to stop, while standing on the deck of an open topped 22ft long boat in the middle of Redstone Lake.

The relative few of you that read this column regularly will remember that in the bleakest of bleak, coldest of cold (January) I had ventured out for a weekend ice fishing with some of Ontario’s finest hunting and fishing fellows. Thankfully, my writing a story about that adventure had not enraged them sufficiently that they didn’t invite me back to the spring lake trout fish.

Or perhaps it had and that’s why I had to share a bunk with the fellow who had invited me in the first place. Punishment for us both, no less!

Either way I had returned to the camp amidst the forest: somewhere not secret but little known to those not in the know. After a brief sojourn onto Kennisis Lake on Friday afternoon, the moose pasta had gone down a treat, as had one, two, no at least three too many beers and the odd rum and coke.

The next morning proved more difficult to swallow. With heads throbbing, we waited at the landing, the windows of the truck cab slowly steaming up as the rain came down.

A break in the weather, and mine and three other boats slid off trailers, into the water, out of the small bay and onto the lake proper. But, no sooner had we got downriggers up, rods down and fish finders finding fish, the rain came down again. And it poured, and poured and poured. Not your summer shower this, more a deluge biblical style, to wash away a world of sin. No coincidence that us 20 hung-over anglers were on the water at that moment, then!

Only one boat had a cover. Its three sinners grinned and waved in none too savoury a manner from beneath their canvas sanctuary as we slowly trolled past in the downpour.

Now, the sensible among you will ask why didn’t we speed back off the lake the instant the first raindrops hit? Well, fishermen are made of sterner (read stupider) stuff than that. And, besides we had to catch lunch.

Four hours later the rain stopped. Coincidently, we had left the lake after three hours and fifty minutes of fishing. I’m beginning to think that my biblical theory was true!

Back in camp following this damp but successful fishing trip (lunch was in the bag, and there was lake trout for dessert too, if we fancied), 20 smiling fishermen divested themselves of sodden coats, hats, pullovers, and boots. The coffee pot bubbled and my socks dried merrily on the woodstove. “Look at them steam,” I remarked from my fireside perch. That ain’t steam chuckled the barber as my socks burst into flames.

I closed my eyes again, wincing. Some kind-hearted soul had tried to douse the sock fire with a cup of hot coffee. But, not being of the best aim, his beverage had sloshed straight into my lap.