On Seymour Lake: Annual fishing tourney is “a family thing”

copyright the Chronicle February 11, 2015

by Maria C. Young

There were more stories than fish coming out of the ice at the start of the Derby Line Fire Department’s Annual Ice Fishing Tournament on Seymour Lake Saturday.

Three feet of snow and 20 inches of ice made a formidable barrier between the fishermen and the landlocked salmon, lake trout and brown trout they were after.

From the center of Seymour Lake, there’s an awesome view. Looking south, Elan Hill forms the backdrop, and beyond is Bald Mountain’s pyramid peak.  To the north is Wildwood Valley, where stories and remnants of a skier’s rope tow and the four-cylinder engine that ran it still linger.

Tournament founder Rob Joyal looked out to a high seep on Elan Hill and told how steam rises like smoke from this saddle near the summit. It beckoned him to explore as a teenager, and it still catches his attention now. There are rumored to be deep caves on the heights of the hill, he said.

As he looked out, the smoke rose from several shanties, the two-stroke rev of an auger broke the quiet, and between the pickup trucks and shanties, the silhouettes of tip-ups and fishermen hunched over their rods and holes marked the horizon where snow, ice, and lake met the sky.

Rob Joyal has been ice fishing on Seymour Lake since he was a kid. He founded this annual fund-raiser for the Derby Line Volunteer Fire Department 13 years ago. Just off the public beach, Mr. Joyal mans the check-in station, which serves as his shanty most other weekends.

Friends crowded in, newcomers bought raffle tickets, and a young buck tried to throw in his hat and his luck when his auger failed to start. Mr. Joyal and fellow fire department volunteer Brian Dubois were not about to let that happen, and several augers were offered up.

“Rob taught all of us how to fish,” Mr. Dubois said, as he looked out to familiar faces gathering nearby and familiar shanties off in the distance.

It’s here in the check-in station where the catch is weighed and laid out for measure. The winner’s podium just outside is a Jet Sled filled with snow, a temporary resting spot for a champion fish until a bigger lunker comes in.

It was in a shanty like this that Mr. Joyal remembers his early times on the ice, when his uncle taught him to fish. They’d spend the nights out, feeding the wood stove in the small shanty.

“The guy on the bottom bunk was always freezing, the guy in the middle bunk was just right, and the guy on the top was sweating,” Mr. Joyal recalled. It’s a vertical hierarchy that comes with the territory when living in a small space and cranking the heat on a wood stove.

While some think of fishermen as eager for a camera shot with their trophy fish, the first to hold the morning’s record for biggest lake trout had to be coerced by his big brother and father.

Cartoons might come to mind when thinking of what kids choose to do on a cold, Saturday morning, but the Falconer family has a different routine. On nearly every weekend of ice fishing season, they head to the ice, and mostly to Seymour Lake. Chad Falconer estimates that his family has caught (and for the most part, released) about 45 lakers this season.

Saturday morning, to be ready for the tournament, the Falconer family woke at 2 a.m. Mom and baby sister stayed home Saturday, but often they are in the picture, too. It’s a way of life that lights up the eyes of ten-year-old Taylor. It’s the “fight in the fish” that he likes the most.

A big laker can take 45 minutes to reel in. It’s a joy that has been passed down through generations.

“My mother taught me to fish,” Mr. Falconer said. When he was a teenager, he discovered ice fishing, right on Seymour.

He used to bring Taylor to their shanty on Seymour when he was just in his car seat. They bundled him up, but he recalled one below zero day when Taylor’s eyelashes were frozen.

“My dad teaches me quite a bit,” said Taylor, as he talked about what he learns from his time hunting and fishing and being outside.

Mr. Joyal directed people down-lake to the record holder of the tournament, Duane Bowen, who pulled out a six-pound lake trout in 2010.

The trophy wasn’t the result of beginner’s luck. Like Mr. Joyal and Mr. Falconer, Mr. Bowen has been ice fishing on Seymour since he was a teenager. He taught his partner, Tammy Lee Morin, and daughter Dakotah to ice fish years ago, and it suits them well. Now, Ms. Morin said, “We go every weekend, every chance we get.”

While home is just up from the lake, this shanty must be a close second. The perimeter is lined with two comfortable padded benches, shelves, a tiny wood stove and the requisite tiny wood to fuel it, and a small cookstove, too, where Mr. Bowen said they eat more venison than fish. The country music on the radio sounded just right. And, while 86 degrees might be a bit warmer than the average kitchen, it felt just about right too, with the outdoor temps holding in the teens.

Ms. Morin was jigging her rod through a ten-inch hole in the linoleum floor as she shared the story of how she came to be there. Across the lake, her three sons fished together, and she was keeping an eye out, hoping one came soon to show his catch.

Dakotah said the best part about ice fishing is without a doubt catching fish. She’s captured the youth records in this tournament, too. When Mr. Bowen came in, he laced up her skates, and out she went, to the ice and snow that are her winter weekend backyard.

Dakotah goes to school in Derby now, since the E. Taylor Hatton Elementary School of Morgan shut down in 2012. Dakotah’s first trip to the Seymour ice was when she was six months old, in diapers. Her prize fish photo hangs on the wall, but it’s not just the trophy lunker that keeps them coming back.

“It’s a family thing,” Mr. Bowen said, and this is easy to see.

Ice fishermen agree that there is a predominant morning run and evening run in Seymour Lake. For these fishermen, their own patterns keep beat with the fish runs, and a few of the other comings and goings of a winter day with friends and family close by.

While tending the jig, checking the bait, and watching the tip-up requires patience, there is time in the middle of the day and in the pre-dawn hours for fried venison, for a quick run to the general store, for family, for friends, for getting into trouble, and out of it.

Mr. Bowen’s story of breaking through weak ice at the outlet with his four-wheeler a few years back (which he quickly returned to the frozen surface with a winch) seems benign compared to the tales of pickup trucks that have sunk below the ice into the frigid waters. With this winter’s arctic temps and persistent snowstorms, this ice felt solid; this shanty wasn’t going anywhere.

When Mr. Bowen said with a smile that he expected he’d win this tourney, this reporter noted that claim had already been taken. Earlier at the check-in station, a young man with a gleam in his eye said just a few words: “Paul St. Jean,” and he smiled. “That’s the name you’ll see in the winner’s category,” he added confidently.

Mr. Bowen laughed and said, “That’s Fish.”

Fish got his name from the unique way he earned his spending money during winter weekends on the ice: He’d visit a shanty and pester the fishermen until one paid him a dollar or more to swallow a live smelt. The amount “all depended on how much he could weasel out of us,” Mr. Joyal said.

In the end, Taylor Joyal beat out his younger brother for the winning lake trout, with a four-pound, four-ounce beauty. In the adult category, Brendan Ward had the tourney’s record laker, weighing in at five pounds, six ounces. David Ott pulled in a four-pound, five-ounce landlocked salmon.

Mr. Bowen’s luck was with him in the raffle, where his ticket was drawn for a new ice auger. Mr. Joyal estimated that between the raffle and the 60-plus participants in the tourney, about a thousand dollars was raised for the Derby Line Fire Department.

As for Fish, his name is written in the legends of Seymour Lake, but he didn’t make the record book this time.

For more free articles from the Chronicle like this one, see our Featuring pages.  For all the Chronicle’s stories, subscribe:

Print subscription

Annual online subscription

Short-term online subscription