Fishing guidebook details area's hot spots
Posted By Douglas Gloin
Posted 1 year ago
Jason Marleau walked away from his job as an accounts manager a decade ago to become an outdoor writer and has never looked back.
The latest publication he has worked on, compiled with the Burnaby, B.C. based publisher Backroad Mapbooks, is a new fishing map guidebook of central Ontario that highlights the best known, and in some cases least known, lakes in the areas in and around Algonquin Park. The book targets waters in the Ministry of Natural Resources’ new Central Ontario fishing region, Zone 15.
Marleau, who with his wife now runs the Barry’s Bay Cottage Resort on Carson Lake, was working at a bank in Castlegar, B.C. when he met the Mussio brothers, Wesley and Russell, who had already made a name for themselves with their map books on back country roads. Marleau is associate director of the Backroad Mapbooks series, while the Mussio brothers are directors.
Marleau, whose wife works for the MNR, is originally from the Peterborough area and lives down there in the winter. He has worked on more than a dozen in the guidebooks series so far. They include four fishing mapbooks done on Ontario waters, and others focusing on Western Canada’s waters. He says the company usually has a half-dozen guidebooks on the go at any given time, and usually publishes three books a year across the country.
The Central Ontario Fishing Mapbook retails for $25.95. In this area, it can be found at the Algonquin Bound store in Whitney, at Yakabuski’s Home Hardware and Barry’s Bay Outfitters, as well as at outlets inside Algonquin Park.
“I’ve always been drawn to the area” around Algonquin Park, Marleau said in a recent telephone interview. The fishing guidebook stems from “a compilation of work done for a number of other books,” he says. “We re-researched the whole thing and included an expanded area.”
“We look at the main water bodies that everybody’s going to,” he says. “Then we basically scatter in a bunch of little hidden lakes – little Brookie (brook trout) lakes, for example.”
A versatile angler who learned to love fly fishing in British Columbia, Marleau includes tips for all types of angler. He says he never turns down an opportunity to go out and “research” a local lake, and confesses an enduring love for chasing after brook trout.
The guidebook highlights some well-known lakes such as Golden Lake, Algonquin’s Opeongo Lake, the Madawaska River, Kamaniskeg Lake, Bark Lake and Aylen Lake, as well as others near Haliburton, Bancroft, North Bay, and points in between.
The guidebook’s features include area indicator maps, lake maps with depth charting, tips on fishing techniques and bait for that particular body of water, elevations, mean depths and longitude and latitude way points.
