All Fishermen Are Liars Read Online Free

wander, only to be periodically wrenched back to the present in no uncertain terms. If I were one to offer advice on trolling to other fly fishers, I’d say the same thing their mothers said about spinach: At least try it before you say you don’t like it.
    For that matter, I’ve met any number of fly fishermen who can’t get excited about catching lake trout, although it isn’t clear why. I’ve heard it said that they don’t fight well, but in my experience, at much past eight or ten pounds they’re a real handful on a fly rod, and they go way past that. Lake trout are the largest of the char—the same family that includes the beloved brook trout. They readily take flies, and under the right conditions they can grow as big as tarpon. A constant reminder of that at Great Bear Lake is that at six feet and 160 pounds, I would fit in any of the big nets the guides carry. But I guess there’s no accounting for taste.
    That night at dinner I located my name tag and sat down with some guys from Winnipeg who’d had a good day trolling with spoons. They do put name tags on the dinner tables, which struck me as quaintly formal, and I couldn’t help wondering how they decided who should sit with whom. My best guess is that since there were both fly and gear fishermen in camp—not to mention the odd switch-hitter—this was simply an attempt to keep us from huddling with our own kind out of habit.
    These dinners were crowded and boisterous and could be disorienting after a quiet day on the water. There were twenty-five fishermen in camp that week and that many people eating and bragging at once can raise the decibel level. And this against a backdrop of nearlythat many more waitresses, cooks, guides, pilots, mechanics and others who seemed constantly busy, even though you couldn’t always guess at their job descriptions. One especially cold, wet day when we were fishing close to camp, we came in to get warm and have lunch out of the rain. A man down at the dock told me, “If you go in the back door of the kitchen, the woman there will give you a big, wet kiss and a hot lunch, or, if you’re lucky, just lunch.” On his tax return, this guy’s occupation would be listed as “camp comedian.”
    But even with all those fishermen in camp, it was rare to see another boat on the water, and when you did, it wasn’t much more than a speck passing in the distance, too far away to hear the outboard. That was no accident. Great Bear Lake is an inland sea covering just over twelve thousand square miles, and although you can reach only a corner of it by boat from the lodge, there’s still a lot of water to spread out in. The guides are also fully aware that no one wants to fly all that way into the Canadian wilderness to fish in a crowd, so every evening they divvy up first, second and third choices so no one gets in anyone else’s hair. These meetings sometimes delve into the fishermen’s skill levels and the amount of babysitting they require and so are best held in private. That’s one reason why the guides don’t sit down to dinner with the clients. Another is that, however charming we might be, after eight or ten hours with us, they could stand a break.
    Unless a guide has made arrangements with one of the clients to go out and fish in the evening, he’s likely to finish his dinner and retire to the collection of staff cabins set off at some distance from the rest of the place. This area is known as Guide Land and is strictly off limits to civilians.
    Plummer’s Great Bear Lake Lodge is one of three established camps and several other fly-outs run by the same outfit. It was founded by Chummy Plummer (the grandfather and namesake of the present owner) and his son Warren in the early 1950s—whenlife and fishing were both simpler—and by now it sprawls all over a narrow peninsula in Great Bear Lake like the improvised village it is. The place isn’t junky, but it was built for function instead of fanciness and does show