Welcome to Week CCXXV of ‘Fishing Parkland Shorelines’. Like most of us I am a novice fisherman, loving to fish, but far from an expert. In the following weeks I’ll attempt to give those anglers who love to fish but just don’t have access to a boat, a look at some of the options in the Yorkton area where you can fish from shore, and hopefully catch some fish.
When you head out in August to fish parkland Saskatchewan lakes from the shore you tend to be tempting fate to deal you a slow day more than usual.
My personal experience has been that August fishing is typically slow, especially from shore since you can’t go sit your boat over some deeper holes where fish may congregate to find cooler water.
But no one ever said a fisherman isn’t ready to defy the odds and give it the old-fashioned ‘college try’.
So Sunday evening, knowing Monday was a day off to recuperate my son and I headed out.
Up front it was Adam’s choice, his truck, where we ended up going, and he selected the Theodore Dam. That piece of information should be made abundantly clear as a way of explanation for the way the evening progressed.
Now there is the old saying about even a bad day of fishing being better than most other days, and I will hold to that.
As summer evenings go Sunday was a Saskatchewan rarity in being almost perfect.
It was not the brain-baking hot of some of the weekends this summer, the kind that meant crawling out of the house to face the inferno meant many fun activities were simply sweat-fests.
And, somewhat to our surprise there were no pesky mosquitoes. It has been a hot, relatively dry summer, so the puddles from where many mosquitoes emerge have not existed so the pests have not been as big a problem this year, but to sit on a shore and fish without the need to bath in repellent was a pleasure.
The weather made the evening pleasant.
And as we cast and cast and cast, the realization that the weather was likely to be the highlight of the evening, we did what guys do, we began to ask time-wasting questions to wile away the monotony of casting without a nibble.
“What is your favourite TV show?” he asks.
That little question probably chewed through 20-minutes, and I’m not sure I ever did offer up a definitive answer. Even as I write this I can’t quite come up with just one, although I do recall mentioning the just concluded series ‘Grantchester’ a fine British show on PBS, as one I very much enjoy.
Still no nibbles, although we are bringing in the occasional weed, so we could have made salad in a pinch.
So the conversation evolved naturally. “What new TV series are you looking forward to this fall?”
That was a shorter conversation because not a lot of new stuff looks worth an hour of my time to watch.
There is Black Lightning a new superhero show on CW, to join the likes of Arrow and Flash. As a long time comic book fan, it’s a must. Having raised my son to like comics as a good father should, we were actually in agreement on this one, which shortened the discussion somewhat.
A mini-series also made my short list. Bad Blood, The Vito Rizzuto Story, which stars Anthony LaPaglia (Without a Trace) in the lead role, as crime boss Vito Rizzuto, should be a good one.
The series, which was filmed in Montreal and Sudbury, also stars Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy) as right-hand man Declan Gardiner and Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas) as patriarch Nico Rizzuto Sr.
And so went the evening. Nice weather, mindless discussion, and no fish, pretty much what I expected out of an August fishing jaunt.
But then just a little luck to make the evening a tad more memorable, as we are leaving I noted we hadn’t even seen any wildlife, at least past a few gulls as Adam pointed out.
As if on cue a small flock of pelicans glided over the grid road just ahead of us, and a couple of miles later a whitetail stood and watched us heading home.
As I sit back and think about it, it was truly a fine fishing trip, just perfect for an August evening.
