Noon shore lunches
Boy, I am hungry for a good meal of deep fat fried fish filets.
For those of you that read my columns on hunting, fishing and other outdoor fun, you will recall that each summer I travel to northern Canada for some world class fishing. One of the highlights of those trips is the noon shore lunches. Shore lunches are a custom of backcountry Canadian fishing. Early in the morning, we catch several walleyes that are kept fresh in the live-well on the boat. At noon, we make a short boat ride to an island where the fishing guides prepare a great lunch of fresh fried fish.
As we beach our boats, one guide jumps out with an ax and begins to split some firewood. He soon has a roaring fire going in a steel fireplace. The other guide in our second boat takes the walleyes out of the live-well and begins to fillet the fish. Soon there is a large cast iron frying pan full of hot canola oil. The freshly cleaned fish are then breaded and placed into the frying pan.
Within a few minutes the hot fish filets plus some fried potatoes and a vegetable are served. Boy, is that super good eating! I tend to really stuff myself. Talk about fresh fish -- can’t get much fresher than that. We are eating fish that were swimming around only 15 minutes before we began eating them.
I haven’t had one of those great fish meals for a while. Hopefully that will change this week. This week I will fish the Thompson Chain of Lakes. I will likely troll a small green triple teaser lure with a red head. I will probably catch a mix of perch and Kokanee salmon. Now the Kokanee are nicely pink meated, very tasty and good eating. But I will also likely catch some good-sized perch. These perch have white meat and are very delicious when fried in deep fat. This will be my substitute for my longing for a Canadian shore dinner. This coming summer my son and I will travel to northern Saskatchewan for some great fishing and more great shore dinners.
Meanwhile back in Montana, the recent May-June edition of Montana Outdoors had several great articles. One short article was about two grizzlies that had been trapped and relocated from the North Fork to the Greater Yellowstone grizzly eco-system. The purpose of moving those bears was to provide some genetic interchange between the bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall) and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Some biologists feel that to maintain a healthy bear population, there needs to be some genetic interchange. According to the approved Montana grizzly bear plan, Fish, Wildlife and Parks wants to maintain the current very high population of bears in the Continental Divide Ecosystem in hopes that some of those bears would wander a couple hundred miles south to bring some genetic diversity to the Yellowstone grizzly ecosystem.
That would likely bring lots of bear- people conflicts as those bears wandered south through the people populated Missoula, Helena and Butte areas. That didn’t seem like the best idea to me.
One of my friends, a non-biologist, said that Fish, Wildlife and Parks should simply capture a few local bears and truck them to Yellowstone. That was a common-sense, low-cost idea. Apparently they listened. So, we now have Northern Continental bear genetics in the Yellowstone ecosystem. Good news!
The state grizzly plan also wants the surplus grizzlies in the Northern Divide ecosystem to wander westward into the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem which needs more bears. Under the state management plan, dozens of grizzlies would have to wander across the Flathead Valley to reach the Cabinet-Yaak. Again, the commonsense solution is to live capture a few bears and truck them into the Cabinet-Yaak. How many bear-human conflicts would be avoided by not having dozens of grizzly bears wandering across a valley with over 120,000 residents and several million summer tourists? Both people and bears would likely die. Trucking a few bears seems like a common-sense alternative.
Time is running out for hunters to apply for many special hunts this fall. Don’t forget! Meanwhile, enjoy our great spring weather. Get out and enjoy our vast areas of public land, rivers and lakes.