Trout Fishing Joe’s Brook

Joe’s Brook
My brother Don and I have been exploring and fishing Joe’s Brook for the last couple of years. I remember Don saying “I have a brook on the forestry access road just off the Trans Canada Highway between Gambo and Gander that I’d like to try”. So we did. Little did we know that it would turn out to be a place we would go numerous times in the next few years. We had great success that first time and it continued to be productive late in the season and even after being fished more frequently by others. This last time there we saw two trailers parked nearby which may mean it’s too easy to get to and spell it’s demise.
Joe’s Brook where we access it from a bridge on the forestry road, is made up of a series of “rattles and steadies”. These are Newfoundland terms for what I would describe as rapids and pools. When the water level is down to a normal (summer) level you can pretty much walk down the brook on the rocks in the rattles. You could not white water canoe these spots because there is more rock then water and the steadies aren’t really large enough. We have been catching pan size trout in the steadies at the end of the rattles. I believe the trout sit and wait in the deeper pools for the rushing water of the rattles to deposit bugs and water larvae. Sometimes the surface of the water seems to boil with there feeding activity even to the point that they get air-born completely out of the water.
One of the reasons that Joes Brook continues to attract us is not only because we have always caught trout there but because about a mile down it empties into a large pond that until this year we have not been able to get around. There is even more brook below the pond and we know it goes quite a way down before it empties into the very large, thirty mile long Gander Lake. So after having such good luck on the upper part of the brook we have been yearning to get to the rest of the brook like some sort of fisherman’s golden fleece. Last year we continued on the logging road past the bridge looking for access to the lower end. We hiked over a cut-over to a feeder stream that led to the pond. The feeder stream produced quite a few trout. We had our limit before we even got to the pond which was great but still we failed to get past the pond. Another time we tried to walk around the pond but about half way I called a halt. It was a way to hard slog already and the prospects of getting all the way around and then having to do it all over again to get back was too much work and as a fifty something year old I wasn’t that interested in pushing the heart attack limits. I wanna’ trout fish not die. So you can see how this has become a mission for Don and I. Well this year we got a satellite print-out that showed where the old logging roads went and how close they got to the brook, giving us possible access points. Don and I took my old truck, found the logging roads and went as far as we could on wheels and continued hiking on foot across a cut-over and then through a thin strip of bush that the loggers are supposed to leave around waterways. Success!! We hit the brook right below the pond. As we approached the woods we could hear the rushing water which made us feel good and meant we weren’t gonna’ get lost or have to trek through more cutover or dense bush. Sometimes the alder thickets around the streams are virtually impassable and the cutovers are just a mash of skidder ruts and small tree parts, very tedious hiking. It had taken three years to get to this point …we were feeling good.
This was the last stretch of the brook before it empties into Gander Lake, our goal had been realized. It was beautiful, lotsa’ water and fast flowing, a continuous rattle, definitely not navigable by canoe or kayak We got the worms out and went at it working our way down the brook. Now at this point I use that term brook loosely because this is the last section of the stream and it has collected all the water from its feeder streams and it’s been raining a lot. This is really a small rocky river rushing to its grand finale, Gander Lake. Trouble is, there are no steadies. It does not slow down and form those pools that the trout so love to sit in wait of food that flows into the pools from the steadies. Trout sitting in a still pool are called a hover of trout. Well there was no place for these trout to form a hover. We walked quite a ways down the brook before we gave up. Stunningly beautiful, but disappointing as far as catching fish. So again we called a halt to the trek on Joe’s Brook and began the arduous hike back to the pond. At the pond we fished for awhile and managed to salvage the day by getting a few decent trout for dinner. It is the nature of exploring streams and brooks looking for trout. You are bound to be disappointed. Somebody will have been there before, there is not enough water, you are not there at the right time, the fish are not hungry. In this case the topography of the land the brook was going through did not create the environment we needed for optimum trout conditions. But life is a verb and it is all about the action. Don and I spent quality time dreaming about and activating our attempts to find a way to the lower end of Joe’s Brook and we did it. The saga of Joe’s Brook has come to an end.

~ by gwcollins on January 15, 2008.