Oh, it’s such a perfect day;
I’m glad I spent it with you.
— Lou Reed

There are fishing days where everything goes wrong. I once arrived at the check-in counter at LaGuardia for a saltwater trip only to realize that I left my rod case leaning against my apartment door.

Forgotten gear, broken rods, blown-out water. When it happens, you try to laugh it off with some bullshit angling line like – A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of anything else. It’s not.

There’s a small lake at the end of a gravel road in Northern Ontario. It’s much like a thousand other Canadian lakes, ringed with cottages, perfectly shorn birch and maple that the deer can reach from the ice to help get through a long winter, and a multitude of docks—from concrete and steel to rusty nails and pallets.