As usual I’ve followed late. My buddies kept reporting fish: Jake, a few steelhead and salmon; Mike, a big buck steelhead; Bob, eight steelhead and two big coaster brook trout. Finally last week I caught an aggressive, jumping, turning, flopping 25-incher, then the next day a lazy, rolling, pulling 20-incher. Much smaller than Mike’s 32-incher.
But mine were a long time coming. It seems as if they were a long time growing. This time of year, steelhead, migratory rainbow trout, are cruising the shore of Lake Superior, preparing to enter the Flute Reed River to spawn. These fish, I caught on the Hovland dock, 150 yards down shore from the mouth of the river. Playing a steelhead in the lake is like playing the footing of a bridge. And playing a steelhead in the stream is like managing a waterlogged pine log going downstream.
Upriver on the Flute Reed, the first trout I ever caught was a 9-inch-long jack. A rainbow of some sort, either stocked, or a steelhead from Superior, or a resident, or lost. That was up at my great-uncle’s place, on the North Road, behind Webers’ corner. My old man took us down into the acres of old sheep fencing, below the high clay banks eroding in the sun. In this stagnant, moss-choked pool, at a dog-leg right, I coaxed out this trout with a #0 Mepps spinner (squirrel tail). From then on, my thoughts always returned to trout and salmon and their migrations, and fishing them.
As a 12-year-old boy, James Egan wrote to the Minnesota DNR Fisheries in Grand Marais and he received a reply, which he has saved all of these years. Photo courtesy of James Egan
One anachronistic skill that my parents nurtured in me was letter writing. I think I was a very strange boy, trying to perfect and enjoying so much the writing of letters. I wrote to my hero at the time, Al Lindner, fisherman, Mr. “In-Fisherman.” He wrote me back. I wrote away for mail-order muskrat traps. I wrote away and enrolled in a correspondence course in taxidermy.
When I was twelve, I wrote to the Minnesota DNR Fisheries Department in Grand Marais, Mr. Steve Persons possibly. And he replied. He replied with a large, cunningly folded brown-stock map called “North Shore Fishing Guide.” And for the nearly forty years since, this and later additions became my guide.
Now I live on the Flute Reed River, in Hovland, upstream from the lake. Looking back, I guess all of my wishes have come true; at least, it’s hard to remember some of the other ones, I suppose. Be careful that when you reach 50, all of your wishes haven’t yet come true.
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