Water Works: Bring the Bacon

by Bob Luck
Two days ago, I returned from a 5-day horse pack trip in the Willmore Wilderness of the Alberta Rockies.  My college buddy, Harry Nelson, had invited me to join him and three veteran outfitters, Johnny, Art and Ferlin.  I flew up to Edmonton and soon afterwards found myself riding my horse Baldy up the Wildhay River.  The hazing started about 2 hours into the trip.  I asked Ferlin where he got his name.  He told me “From Ferlin Husky”.  “Who is Ferlin Husky”? I innocently asked.  “Oh my God, you don’t even know Ferlin Husky?  Wings of a Dove”?  I didn’t, and I still don’t.  Harry joined along in the laughter but secretly confessed later that he had never heard of Ferlin Husky either.
This was primarily a horse riding trip, but Harry had promised me I could get in some fishing on the Wildhay, which was rumored to be packed with bull trout. After a three hour ride into the park, Harry and I wandered down to the river to see if we could catch some trout while our outfitters set up camp.  Harry is not much of an angler but was willing to throw a few casts and stand guard with the bear spray.  Over the course of two hours, we tried a variety of tactics and flies, and we had just one four-incher come up to take a swipe at my hopper.  Later in camp, Johnny told us he would take us to some beaver dams where we might have better luck.  “And you should bait your hooks with bacon.  I haven’t been fishing in a long time but when I was young, I fished a hole about ½-mile downstream and caught a 26” bull trout.  I took a hunter I was guiding to the same place, and he caught a 28 incher.  Both of us were using bacon.”  Art and Ferlin nodded in assent and made it clear with both verbal and nonverbal signals that any idiot who used flies instead of bacon was a hopeless tenderfoot doomed to go fishless.

​The next afternoon, after a ride up to Eagle’s Nest Pass, Johnny dropped us off at the beaver ponds.  The largest pond was deep and fishy looking, but 15 minutes of streamer fishing yielded nothing.  I moved over to a smaller pond where I found a point with a deep looking channel beside it.  I cast my beadhead Woolly Bugger into the channel, twitched it a few times, and got snagged.  Then the snag moved.  It wasn’t 26 or 28 inches, but it was a fat 20 inch bull trout that I could barely get my hand around.  And the closest piece of bacon was back at camp.  We fished the beaver ponds for a while longer, had one missed strike, and walked back to camp.
The following day we took a long ride up to a fishless but stunning alpine lake, but arrived back in time to take a walk down to Johnny’s honey hole.  Forty years later, it was still there.  Harry hooked one fish, and I managed to land two between ten and twelve inches.  I also lost a bigger fish—I got a good look at it and estimate that it was about 17”—not as big as that beauty from the beaver pond, but big enough that I still torture myself thinking about what I could have done differently to land it.
At breakfast on our last full day, Art surreptitiously handed me a slice of bacon in a Ziploc bag, and I slipped it into my pocket.  That afternoon I headed back downstream, cut the bacon into little pieces, and threaded one onto my Woolly Bugger.  In the next half-hour I had at least 20 strikes.  I landed only five trout—all between 10 and 12 inches. A few of the fish that got away were larger, although I’m not sure if there were any monsters. A glob of bacon on the shank of a barbless hook makes it easy for the fish to get off, and by the time I had figured out that I had to slim down the bacon from a chunk to a strip in order to get a good hook set, the action had died down.  When I got back to camp and delivered my fishing report, Johnny, Art and Ferlin were, putting it lightly, amused.
The next day we rode in pouring rain back to civilization, cold beer and hot showers.  I’ve learned a few things about fishing the Wildhay.  The bull trout like big flies fished with some action, and they bunch up in the few places where the current slows down and forms deep runs.  The next time I go, I am confident I will catch more fish on flies than this time.  But I’m not promising I won’t try bacon.

Beaver Pond Bull

Bacon Eating Bull

Front: Harry, Bob, Ferlin Back: Johnny, Art