Back from Jersey, bound for the Broadback

Things have been hectic around the office since I returned from my two-week vacation this past Monday. Not only have I had to deal with an overflowing e-mail in-box and other editor-type matters, I’ve also been getting my ducks in a row for my next big fishing adventure: the Broadback River in northern Quebec.

Actually, the impending Broadback trip explains why I largely took it easy (in terms of fishing) during my family vacation last week at Sea Isle City on the South Jersey coast. I had intended to do a lot of surf fishing, but my elbow was having none of it (my followers on Twitter will already know that I’m suffering from lateral epicondylitis, more commonly known as tennis elbow or, as in my case, fisherman’s elbow). My youngest daughter, Molly, and I caught a few tiddlers in the surf (see photos), but I felt it best to save my elbow for the Broadback.

The trip gets underway tomorrow morning with the 1,100-kilometre drive north to Chibougamau in northern Quebec. From there, we’ll meet our hired floatplane at 10 a.m. on Saturday for the 65-air-mile jaunt to our secret put-in spot on the Broadback. I’d tell you where exactly, but the trip instigator, Gord Deval, would kill me.

Gord has been making the pilgrimage up to this stretch of the Broadback for more than two decades now, a journey immortalized in the late Paul Quarrington’s hilarious Fishing With My Old Guy (Gord being the Old Guy). In that this may well be Gord’s final trip to the Broadback (he’s 80 years old now) and given that Paul died of lung cancer earlier this year, it just made some kind of poetic sense to me that I should finally accept Gord’s longstanding invitation to tag along. With us will be two other hardy souls, Scot Benson and David Johnson.

Back to my elbow. The reason I want to save as much tendon as possible (I have my latest round of physio and acupuncture later today) is that we’ll be fly casting nine weights into fast water for, with any luck, lots of brook trout approaching 10 pounds. That’s the plan, anyway. Even if the fish aren’t that big (hell, I’d be happy with a five-plus), I’ll still be casting-and I’ll need my elbow.

In all, we’ll be camping and canoeing up there for eight sleeps, with the plane returning to pick us up on September 5. As I will be out of blogging and tweeting range, expect to see a big gap in my communications until we return. Stay tuned for my report after Labour Day.