LORENZE LAKE, ONTARIO

One year, sometime in the early 80’s, I decided to set up a trip quite a distance into northern Ontario. Four of us were going. My old buddy Jay, one of my best friends, Ray Bennett and another guy. Can’t remember his name. He wasn’t the type that a person would remember.

On this trip, we were headed for a lake called Lorenz Lake. It was up near James Bay, which is connected to Hudson Bay. Which is a bay in Canada, for those of you in Texas. To get there was quite a journey in itself. We had to drive from our home in southern Michigan, north 400 miles or so on I75, to the Canadian Soo. At the Soo we boarded the Algoma Central Railroad train and went north, for 10 hours. Hurst is as far as the train goes north. We spent the night in what passed for a motel, right near the train station. Next morning the flying service sent transportation and took us to the floatplane base. The base was on a fairly large lake. Usually a Beaver is used for these flights. Big, noisy but powerful which is needed for hauling fishermen and their gear into remote campsites. The plane was at the dock so we didn’t waste much time loading our gear. From there we flew north about 140 miles to the lake. It is north of the Albany River, which empties into James Bay. This river was a main traveling route for Voyageurs. Those were French trappers, for our Texas brothers.

The Algoma Central is an unusual train. A person can buy a ticket on it to any mile marker he or she wants to. You can look at a map in the train station and select the lake or river you wish to fish and pay you fare accordingly. You load your gear and canoe on the boxcar and the train will stop wherever you choose. Hundreds of miles of wilderness!! When you get tired of fishing you just go out and flag down the next train and they stop and you are on your way. The train isn’t really very fast and with the many stops a rider gets the chance to see some beautiful landscape. The Agawa Canyon is beautiful.

The lake we were flying to was a big lake and they couldn’t tell us much about it as we were the first group they had ever flown into it to fish. They had flown moose parties into it in the fall. They said it was shallow. They did not tell us just how shallow it was though! :0) There was a good-sized river running into it and another draining the lake. This river ran south, to the Albany.

We were pretty excited about fishing this virgin lake. Right! :0(The lake was about 8000 acres, I would guess. That is just a guess! The deepest place we found was about 5 feet. Man, try to fish walleye in water like that! We decided to explore the river coming into it. We had to get out of the boat, I was using a square sterned canoe, and DRAG the thing into the river! It was so shallow! When we got into the river, it was fine. Nice and deep and lots of fish. Not huge fish but enough to have fun with. It was wild!! We actually saw mink running up and down the banks. Couldn’t believe it! They were all over the place. We explored for miles on that river. Saw plenty of moose too. There was a good indication of how deep the snow gets in the winter. We saw trees that were dropped by beavers. The cuts were 5 ft above the ground! Told Jay that they had big beaver up there! This was caused by the fact that the snow was 4 ft deep on the level!

This story is about a little excursion two morons in our crew took. Namely Jay and I! Like I said, this lake is a big lake. Picture a big round lake with a long peninsula almost splitting it in half, coming from the south. Well not in half but about three quarters of the way up the center. We are camped on the west shore and the outlet river is on the southeast end of the lake. The lake looks like a set of lungs, actually. Anyway, it is a long way to the river from our camp.

One of us had the brilliant idea of exploring the outlet river. Heck, didn’t look too bad on the map! I did happen to mention to Jay that I seemed to remember it being almost all white water, as we flew over it. Not to worry, says he. We will just check out where it leaves the lake. Made sense to me, at the time. :0)

We knew it would be a full days excursion so we went prepared. We took food for a lunch, plenty of gas, bait and one of us suggested taking a little beer. It was a warm day so somehow we figured 18 ought to be just about right. Right!

Off we went! Our little square sterned canoe just a purring along and we were as happy as if we were in our right minds. The lake was as calm as glass and it was a great ride. Heck, Gotta have a beer to kick off the trip, don’t we? To get around that spit of land that is splitting the lake, we had to head northeast. The lake was calm and I will tell you, even though we knew the lake was shallow, the size of it was intimidating. Especially in a canoe. Setting in the canoe, all we could see was the top of the trees. Standing up, I could see the shoreline. I gassed up just before leaving camp and was going to watch and see how much gas it took to get to the river. Wanted to be sure we had enough to get back. I wasn’t no dummy! :0)

We finally got out to where we were to make our cut to the south, toward the river and decided that we should really have another beer to celebrate our success so far. Heck, it was looking like it could be a hot day. We were just a buzzing along, on calm water, and hoping to see some moose. I had to edge the canoe toward the east shore if we were to do that, so I cut her over. After a while we spotted a cow and her calf feeding. They are so damn ugly that they looked like they were built by committee. We didn’t try this time but some times we could get within 15 or 20 ft of them in a canoe. Ain’t smart but we never considered that a deterrent! We decided to toast them with a fresh beer.

We did this and headed for the river. Boy it was turning out to be a great day, fresh air and good companion. The canoe wasn’t very fast but it did give us time to enjoy the scenery. As we approached the river, we couldn’t see it. All there was a lot of brush. The water was flowing through it at a good clip, but we couldn’t see where it was going.

We started weaving our way through it and could hear a roaring noise. Makes a sane man a little tense. Didn’t bother us, for some reason. I have to say here that neither of us really drank much as a rule! Anyway as we broke clear of the brush, there was the river. Beautiful! It dropped directly into a rapids, about a hundred feet ahead of us. I aimed the canoe towards the right bank, which would be the west shore and beached it, directly above the rapids. That was living! Time for another beer!

We decided to fish the rapids a bit. See what we could pick up. We picked our way among the boulders and managed to get in position to make a few casts into the hole at the bottom of the short rapid. Didn’t have much luck so decided to have our lunch. What the heck. Gotta wash it down with something, don’t we. Moose probably pooped in the damn lake anyways. Nother beer!

Now along about here, I figure I should tell you a little about my buddy Jay. Now he is a puny little runt. Sharp as a tack and as nice a guy as you will ever meet. Takes a lot of kidding and doesn’t mind giving it out. Just ain’t no good at it! He had always seemed to be a pretty sensible guy to me and knowing this, I sorta counted on him to control my natural tendency toward getting myself in trouble. Problem is, I had never experienced the little moron when he had been drinking! The damn fool was coming up with some mighty strange ideas. Problem was, when I was drinking, they made perfect sense to me! He was my Forman at work but we enjoyed mutual respect. Not much. :0)

Now we had just eaten our lunch and had popped the top off a beer to celebrate a successful lunch. Jay says," Why don’t we just go down this rapid and see what is down below. Well it didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time. Wasn’t a bad rapids, really and what the heck. Might be some fish down there.

We finish our beer and load our gear and push off into the flow. Dang, the water was pretty low so we clobbered a few rocks, but we rode the rapids or and slid into some slick water. We paddled a way and come to another hole. Broke out the tackle and started casting. We actually caught a couple walleye. Threw them in the cooler. Getting a little room in there now.

Jay says," Lets see what is a little farther down. How far is the Albany anyway?" I told him that we weren’t gonna go to the Albany. It was too far! Told him to pass me a beer. I started the motor and eased downstream. Started hearing a roaring again. Nother rapids! Jay says that the Albany can’t be far. It is only a couple inches on the map! Moron! Trouble was, he wasn’t a moron at the time. Made sense to me!! Heck, a couple inches can’t be far. The whole lake was only about three inches. With a perfectly clear mind, that probably would have told me something. As it was, our minds probably weren’t at their peak. Something about the clear fresh air, seems to cloud a mans thinking, it seems.

We edge up to this rapids and, well I guess you could say I wasn’t paying as much attention to the boat running as a person might be expected to under these circumstances. Well the upshot of it is, we ran another rapids. This bugger was about twice as long and a bit rougher than the last. For some reason we thought it was funny and laughed our ass off and decided to have a beer. Now, I am now starting to put the beer into where it makes sense, as there is no way I can remember when we popped a cap. Who the hell was counting??

We went like this, rapids after rapids for hours. There were places to fish between many of them and we did. We gave no thought of how we were gonna get back and what our buddies back at camp were gonna say. We just kept going and fishing when we could. Caught a few too!!

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