The Lake Where You Live

I’m just back from five days at a lodge on a huge lake in Ontario. My companions and I enjoyed good fishing, but to find walleyes we had to feel our way around, using a map, advice from the lodge owner, our knowledge of fish behavior (such as it is), and information from the boat-mounted sonar.

I enjoy a fishing adventure — on Birch Lake where I live I’d have no chance of hooking what looked like a 30-inch walleye and losing it at the boatside, as I did last week. Still, there’s something to be said for a home lake whose every contour I pretty much know.

I’ve lived on Birch Lake for 11 years and visited each year as a tourist for two-plus decades before that. As a result I’m pretty well familiar with the whole expanse of water. The lake does still surprise me at times, and the ecosystem and the fishery do continuously evolve. 

But back on Birch I don’t have to feel my way. I reached that happy status a couple of years after we bought our property and built our home. It was a weekday, after sunset, the evening fading into gray. I sat in my boat working a jig tipped with a leech. A warm, gentle breeze from the west pushed me along a cabbage-weed edge that, without the aid of daylight or sonar, I knew was there. 

The direction of travel was perfect. On the first drift I hooked and landed a walleye. I motored leisurely back into the breeze, drifted again, and caught another. A third drift, a third walleye, while I watched another boat a ways down the shoreline, lights ablaze, fish locator beeping, and knew its occupants were not in the fish zone. 

That’s the kind of intimacy that comes from being with a lake for decades. I still use a locator. I still rely on visual clues. But in general I know where to go, to catch which species, in what months of the year, at what time of day. 

I enjoy sharing the lake and what I’ve learned with my brothers, close friends and members of our extended family, giving them fishing experiences to remember. 

I don’t know everything about the lake, and some long-time residents are surely better anglers than I am. But in terms of familiarity Birch Lake is like an extension of our property. In effect we live on 180.5 acres, the half-acre being our homesite. 

For five days my companions and I explored the vastness, the many islands and bays and open expanses, the surrounding woods and stretches of sheer granite rock face, of western Ontario’s Eagle Lake. We found our way. Our tackle got a workout. Our menu included abundant daily meals of fresh-caught walleye. 

So for a spell after the return trip I will surely be “fished out.” But in the end it’s a privilege, I’d almost say a miracle, to have home water to come back to.

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting my website at https://thelakeguy.net.