December 2024

Merry Christmas!

The Faux Beaver? Say it isn’t so……..

Yes, you have been a very bad boy / girl / they/ them and there is no VBL newsletter for you this year! Well, that’s not quite true….or is it? In terms of behavior I am harboring worrisome suspicions about some of you. In terms of the annual “Beaver”…….a long standing VBL tradition…..we have reached an impasse. As I write this the postal service in the Great White North has been mired in a month long strike action. There are rumblings about having this resolved in the coming weeks but with the anticipated backlog of mail a Christmas mailing seems to lose some relevancy if you receive it a month late. So, the upper echelons of management at the lodge have scrapped the idea temporarily for this season, and instead we present you with this modified Beaver. Some may say a fake Beaver…..faux castor if you are bilingual. Castador falso, for those bi-lang south of the border. хуурамч сахч for our Mongolian guests.

I’ll be back…

The problem with this change is the paper version of the Beaver had it’s own format, it’s own vibe. I can’t get my head around this change. I have no direction. I’m a bit lost on how to replace it with something I post online. Basically what I’m saying is this has the potential for being crap (insert analogy here). I’m not going to try and recreate it but perhaps looking back on some old photos will give me inspiration.

The smallmouth bass mount in the lodge seems to generate many comments…..some positive, some negative. “That’s a big perch!” Yes, the paint job seems questionable to some…….maybe he forgot to finish off the belly paint. The taxidermist was from Toronto and was later charged with some offences related to illegally mounting bald eagles. It’s remarkable though that it looks as good as it does, considering it’s almost 50 years old. That’s a scary line to write since it was me who caught it back when I worked / guided at North Shore Lodge……..time flies they say.

So here’s the fish in question. A 5 pound smallmouth caught while I was guiding some walleye fishermen. At the time I threw it in the sack (yes, in those days we used burlap sacks to keep our fish in…no live wells back then, and the cooler was too full of beer to accommodate fish) with the intention of eating it at shore lunch. Well, as luck would have it we had plenty of walleye for shore lunch and I thought to myself this might make a good mount. The above picture is the old fish house at NSL with master filleter George Nelson……I suppose you could call him the sensei to a younger, less experienced EL Gordo. Learned a lot from George about filleting, as well as how to “look busy while not actually accomplishing much”. Funny how memory works but I can still smell beaver boiling in a pot of water on his stove when I stopped by his shack for some reason. Note the chain mail “armor” he’s wearing as protection on his filleting hand.

Since I did mention illegal bald eagle mounts, let me just point out the mount in the lodge has the required paperwork from the MNR. It was hit by a vehicle on the highway a number of winters back…….probably working on some road kill. He’s staring at you like he knows you did something bad

Last blog post I had the “weave” going on. Weaving back to North Shore Lodge days (remember George?) here’s the duo that hired young El Gordo to work at their camp…….a 2012 version of Rick and Mary, a.k.a. Lindmeier’s North Shore Lodge. You can often see them hanging around VBL fish fry’s to this very day. Since then, Rick has put a few more fish fry’s under his belt……..Mary looks the same!

They even hired this babe a few years later who eventually became the Susanne part of
“Gord & Susanne”……..(met in May, got married in December)

Still able to catch fish. The nurse with a purse…

Now some of you may have wondered why not just wait for the mail strike to be over and then do the regular newsletter? The main reason is Susanne and Santa have been spending more time in warmer climates……Baja, Mexico to be specific. It’s hard to write newsletters when there’s salt water fishing nearby…

Well, enough of this rambling nonsense. During the depths of winter we often like to focus on when do we get to go fishing again? Unless you head south, or like to ice fish, you are basically buggered till next spring. To help ease your pain and suffering let me present to you a recap of the 2024 season at VBL……

It seems like another eventful year is winding down. We’ve enjoyed meeting new guests this past season as well as welcoming back all our regular folk and are looking forward to doing it all again in 2025. Right now we are 85% booked up for next season, so if you are thinking of heading up this summer don’t put off making plans too much longer. We’d love to have you back and would like to be able to offer you the cabin and week you are looking for. Hopefully you aren’t too disappointed in not getting the regular “Beaver” in the mail. If you thought this was a worthwhile read I would ask that you forward this onto any of your fishing partners I may have missed.

We hope you have a wonderful Christmas and an enjoyable holiday with friends and family! All the best for a happy and healthy New Year as well!

Gord & Susanne