Jigging for cod in Garden Cove

GARDEN COVE – If a bad day fishing beats a good day in the office, then three great days jigging for cod on Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay with my buddy Vaughn has got to be one of most fun things I’ve ever done! It will certainly be a highlight of a trip that features new adventures around every curve!

We were taking part in the final three days of the two-week northern cod food fishery, a sign that there may yet be hope for recovery from the near-destruction of the species due to overfishing by factory ships at the end of the last century. It made me think this tradition is proving every bit as resilient as the people of the Newfoundland outports themselves.

When I met Vaughn nearly 20 years ago, this happy-go-lucky big fella with the full-on Newfie accent was hauling logs out of the bush north of Edmonton. He and Elaine, his journalist-turned-health bureaucrat wife, have since lived in Ottawa, but are now based in St. John’s, where Elaine is now working with the provincial government. But Garden Cove is where Vaughn’s heart lies.

I roared down the Viking Trail – NL Hwy. 430 – and overnighted in Deer Lake. After hearing so many of Vaughn’s tales about life growing up in Garden Cove, that’s where I wanted to be.

Once back on the Trans-Canada, I briefly considered staying the night in Gander, but a national softball tournament had taken up every available hotel, motel and B&B room for miles in every direction.

I pressed on through Clarenville and on into Goobies, where I turned off the Trans-Canada onto NL Hwy. 210 – the Heritage Run – where it turns off for the little hamlets that dot the shore of the bay around the Burin Peninsula. I arrived just as the skies opened and rain that had been threatening for nearly two days let loose with a vengeance.

I waited it out in a small wooden bus shelter next to the post office which has been closed for years. Vaughn was about 20 minutes behind me and we were soon settled into the apartment attached to his mother Elsie’s home with a million-dollar view of the cove and Sound Island across the bay.

We were barely there long enough to drop the bags when Vaughn announced we sailed for the cabin as soon as the tide was high enough to float his fishing boat. Already loaded with rods, reels and lures, gas and beer, we had our lines down into the deep cold water before 9 p.m.

Jigging refers to letting your line drop to the bottom, reeling in a few feet of line, then jerking the line up and down. It simulates the action of a squid, a favourite meal for cod.

I had no idea how quickly and how hard they would be striking! It seemed the line had barely touched bottom before we had the first of our five-per-person-per-boat limit in the boat.

My first catch was an ugly rock cod. “We don’t eat those,” said Vaughn. I let the slimy bugger go!

But we did eat lots of pan-fried cod and cod tongues once were back in the comfy little cabin on Sound Island, watching a dozen or more boats patrolling up and down the bay in search of their own limit.

There is nothing like fresh fish caught from cold water and cleaned and cooked within the hour! There is nothing like a shore lunch!

As we sat back and sipped our beers, I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be, as Vaughn told tales of other fishing trips and his friends up and down the shore. I even met a few of the locals who, like Vaughn, had left Garden Cove to work elsewhere, but who had come home, either for good, for a visit or to be part of the 10-day fishery!

The next day, Vaughn took me around the seven-mile long island dotted with a few rustic cabins like his own. He pointed out the home on Woody Island where he and his parents lived until Newfoundland’s first premier Joey Smallwood depopulated the province’s tiny isolated outports, the better to concentrate government services in this sparsely populated area.

He also showed me the giant oil tankers making their way to and from the Come-by-Chance oil refinery. But the real stars of the day were all natural.

The bay runs up past Garden Cove and the town of Swift Current – yes, Virginia, Canada has two Swift Currents and I've now been to both! -- to another deep-walled canyon or fjord.

Despite the torrential rain that had greeted me, Vaughn and I managed to skirt around the storm that blasted Swift Current Day’s homecoming festivities into a soggy mess.

Lots of other fishermen on the Garden Cove wharf were either caught in the downpour or were waiting it out on shore. We considered ourselves very lucky indeed not to have had any of our three-day fishing excursion spoiled by bad weather!

At different times over the weekend, there was one and sometimes two whales – maybe minkes or finbacks -- rising, spouting and rolling back down into the black calm water. There was the young bull moose who strayed close to the cabin and may well end up in Vaughn and Elsie’s freezers this winter.

There were bald eagles competing with the gulls and terns for the fish that didn’t survive our catch-and-release efforts.

One huge adult eagle came swoop, swoop, swooping almost between us as it chased a low-flying gull across the bay. The gull was wise enough to regurgitate the tommy cod he had swallowed, knowing full well the eagle would be just as happy eating the gull AND the cod! Smart gull! Well-fed eagle!

And lots of cod there was!! We fished them hard on Saturday, catching our limit again. And a lone mackerel and a pollock for good measure.

We had a Jigg’s dinner with Elsie on Sunday night before heading back to the island the cozy cabin on the shore.

By Monday, I was fished out and bid Elsie goodbye and headed on to St. John’s for a few days in my ninth provincial capital city, with only Halifax yet to visit. 

Luckily, there’s a BMW dealer here in town, Avalon BMW Motorrad. Ever since the Cabot Trail a while back, I’ve been worried about the rear tire on the Bike-a-Lounger, my 2001 BMW K1200LT.

Ten days ago, if I rode over a dime, I might have been able to tell you whether it was heads or tails. Today, I could tell you what brand of tobacco the pipe-smokers on the Bluenose were using!

I’d hoped to delay the tire change and an oil change for as long as I could, hoping to get to Boston without either. I’ve already got a service appointment with Avalon for a new Metzeler 880 and an oil change.

I’m too close to the conclusion of a life’s dream to risk failure trying to save a buck or two.

Speaking of bucks, please consider a donation to my Ride for Sight. The money goes to the Foundation Fighting Blindness to fund Canadian researchers looking into the causes and prevention of blindness. 

Ride for Sight is Canada’s largest and longest-running motorcycle charity endeavour. Bikers cover their own expenses so that every penny raised goes to the foundation.