The helicopter ride from Deer Lake to our remote river lodge in the interior of Newfoundland is like an airborne, East Coast animal safari. We hover over herds of running caribou, thousands-strong; pass a mama black bear and her four cubs crashing through the brush; witness a moose calf and its mother, up to their knobby knees in mulch water. After the hour-long ride through the province's wild mammal kingdom, I wonder if it will be difficult to get excited about fish.
We are a group of six women who have come to Newfoundland to fly-fish. Specifically, to try to hook river salmon on an isolated stretch of Grey River. Sue Scott, a diminutive mother of four from Halifax, is a salmon-fishing virgin like me. Shelley Bennett, a native of Newfoundland, is a buff, wisecracking natural athlete. Andrea Lawley is from Halifax and owns a fishing lodge with her husband in Quebec. Kathryn Maroun and Susan Wright are trout-fishing enthusiasts from Toronto. Kathryn, the aficionado of the group, teaches casting techniques to beginners, ties her own flies and goes fishing three times a week.
Though the majority of the women here are, unlike me, skilled fishermen, I am surprised to find that some have yet to catch their first salmon. According to Kathryn, catching a fish is not the point. The point, she says, is the challenge of perfecting your casting technique and absorbing the magic of the river. Kathryn, who goes on several fishing trips in Canada, the United States and Russia each year, has returned every year to the same fishing lodge in Cape Breton with her husband, Lou, also an experienced fisherman, in search of an elusive salmon catch. She has never caught a fish at that lodge. Challenge, it seems, is the main event for the experienced fly-fisher.
From our camp at Grey River Lodge, the fishing will be easier. We go out for a short walk after landing and unpacking our gear. Kathryn points out the salmon stacked in tidy rows in pools that form at the bottom of the river. There are plenty, she says, predicting that we will all catch one by the end of the week. The landscape -- all rock and river and shaggy pine trees -- is difficult to describe without resorting to clichéd adjectives such as "rugged," "pristine" and "majestic." It is easily the most remote and the most beautiful place I have ever seen. If it weren't for the perennial crashing of the river, the silence here would be deafening.
Long before our first cast, we are faced with the challenge of winning over the staff of Grey River Lodge. We are the first all-female fly fishing group that guides Dennis Taverner and Alvin Young and cook Josh Rose have ever hosted.
Fly-fishing, of course, is traditionally a male-dominated sport. It is the stuff of the most macho literature of the 20th century. An exercise in patience and woodsman's skill, it is rivalled only by bullfighting as the quintessential symbol of male sporting prowess. Hemingway's male characters go on fishing trips when they become exhausted by the urban pursuits of wine and women. Similar fishing passages occur in the muscular works of Mordecai Richler, Raymond Carver and William Faulkner -- sometime fishermen all. Salmon fishing is not just a guy thing -- it is the ultimate un-girl thing, the sport that men turn to when they need to leave, strike out on their own and commune with their hunter roots.
But women today are keen to crash the stag party and catch some fish of our own. According to the Atlantic Salmon Journal of Canada, the number of women to take up fly-fishing has risen sharply in recent years. Put into historical perspective, perhaps female interest in the sport is not so surprising. Lyla Foggia's book, Reel Women,reminds us: "Indeed, the history of modern sport fishing begins with a woman, an early 15th-century nun and noble woman named Dame Juliana Berners, who is credited with writing the first tracts on both hunting and fishing." Her Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle,published in 1496, is the first literary chronicle of the sport that inspired so many male writers after her.
Many female fishermen believe that the gentler sex is actually better equipped for the sport because of our supposed inherent, well, gentleness. Specifically, women tend to be more delicate when casting, or in fishing parlance, we are less likely to "muscle the rod." There is also a less credible-sounding theory that salmon heading up river to spawn are attracted to female pheromones.
