A time to heal

My brother Gary, who some of you have met in camp through the years, had an opportunity to visit with me in camp at the end of the season this year. Diagnosed and having been treated for colorectal cancer the last year and a half had made a visit to camp last year impossible for him. Despite a nine year age difference growing up, I could always count on my BIG brother to not leave me (the "kid") behind, and we were very fortunate on short-notice to put an itinerary together that allowed for this visit.

Since camp was for all practical purposes shut down, and it was just the two of us, there wasn't a whole lot to do other than spend some quality time on the water fishing together. By his own admission, Gary isn't an "avid" fisherman, but he does certainly enjoy it and more importantly it provided an ideal setting to relax, recover and reminisce. As we did all that, we also found about four spots very near camp that we could count on to consistently produce good to excellent walleye action. Our time on the water, generally consisted of a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the late afternoon, with most days resulting in us catching about 20-30 walleyes a day, with some northern pike sprinkled in and the occasional hard-fighting whitefish. All said, we had a ball catching and releasing the fat, pre-winter walleyes mostly in the 16-18" range. Most days, I would have to say I caught the most fish, Gary however, caught the biggest of both species: walleye (20") and northern (30"), Neither fish HUGE by any standard, but then again it really wasn't about the fishing anyway.......