Georges Tremel’s passion for fishing and Jasper

For a professional guide, Georges Tremel came late to fishing, but once he found it,  he embraced it with a passion that most men reserve for vices.

And when he parted company with his media career almost 20 years ago, Tremel gravitated to Jasper, the place where he had discovered fish and fishing. 

“Mike Merilovoich made the mistake of offering me a job,” he recalled. 

“I took it,” he said, and an impish grin creased his face.

This Rocky Mountain town is a lifetime removed from his final assignment, a frontline foreign correspondent, covering China for the CBC and the last and largest story of his career, the bloody confrontation and massacre in Tiananmen Square.

“Pop, pop, pop, tat-a-tat-tat – it sounded just like that,” he said, and points his well-used station wagon toward Old Fort Point and the Athabasca River. 

Tremel is breaking in a new hat and it is stiff, not yet bent and shaped, although it looks to have been driven over, and more than once.

Fishing is a sport of gadgets, and Tremel has most of them: fly boxes, extra line, devices to cut and straighten the leader and tippet. It would take some time to catalogue everything he protects with locked compartments built into the wagon after thieves made off with some of his favorite gear.  

He  slides into his neoprene waders and felt-bottomed boots, dons an ancient vest; the contents of  its bulging pockets would instantly drag him to the bottom of the river.

A small red fly is tied to the leader, setting the table for the whitefish that migrate up and down the Athabasca and its tributaries, absorbing pulp mill effluents until they are more health-hazard than food.

“Ten and two, ten and two, ten and two,” Tremel chants the fly casters mantra, “let the rod do the work. But sometimes I forget, and it doesn’t look so good.”

The line flies out, driven by the power of the flexing rod. His casting skills are self-taught, mostly, but he did sign up for a lesson in Burnaby.

“This woman had all my line out and half the backing,” he says, marveling at the memory of that image, “and dropped the fly right in a donut.  It turns out that she was the champion for Western Canada.”

The morning is cold, the river moves silently, bottle-green beneath the old steel bridge, spinning small eddies in the gelid water, bowing the floating line.

The river is full of bull trout, rainbows, pike, whitefish,  but the fishing will only be good until late May. Then snowmelt and spring rain high up in the mountains will colour the water, and wash the fish out of their pools. The best fishing around Jasper is on lakes, from a boat, which gives plenty of room for a backcast.

He doubts that anything will rise; the water is just too cold, the fish too sluggish to feed. He is right, of course. No fish will be caught here, today. But it’s great, isn’t it, just to be standing by the river, wild nature all around?

“Many clients say the same thing,” he says, “they are just thrilled to be out on the river, but they are always happiest when they catch a fish. So am I.”