HUNT: A fish story worth celebrating

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Sylvie Malo-Clark will trade in her fly-fishing gear for a black cocktail dress Saturday night.

That’s when the expert fly-tyer and angler will be ushered into the Atlantic Salmon Museum Hall of Fame in Doaktown – recognition of some 46 years on the waters of New Brunswick and waterways from Quebec to Iceland.

“I never thought in my life that I would end up there,” said the tiny woman. She was 21 years old, had never fished a day in her life and spoke no English when she left the family farm near Granby, Que., to enrol in the English language program at St. Thomas University in June 1977.

But, out with a girlfriend one evening, she met Peter Clark. The author of nine self-published books was a waiter at the Riverview Arms tavern, a popular student hangout at the time.

“He asked me to go together, and I said ‘where’?” she remembered. It was her friend who translated.

“You dodo … he asked you to go steady. And you said yes.”

I never thought in my life that I would end up there

Sylvie Malo-Clark

Their first date took them to Clark’s camp on the Nashwaak.

Suffice it to say she fell hook, line and sinker. Most of their dates that summer were trout fishing excursions on Valentine Lake.

They’ve been fishing buddies for 46 years, happily married for 44. Fittingly, they spent their anniversary weekend this year fishing together.

“When she first met me, she wouldn’t have known what a trout was,” said Clark, a 2019 hall-of-famer. “Slowly, she became addicted.”

Indeed.

The nomination form that documents her fishing accomplishments covers nine pages, including her appearances at fly-tying shows in Vermont and New Jersey and in schools around the province as an instructor in the art, as well as her catch of a lifetime: a 48-inch female salmon that weighed “well over 40 pounds,” caught at Larry’s Gulch on the Restigouche on June 22, 2016. Later that summer, she caught two more that were 30-plus pounds.

Five feet tall and 140 pounds, she fought with the heavyweight fish – which published reports say weighed 47.2 pounds – for 45 minutes.

“I was shaking like a leaf,” she said.

She didn’t get the traditional posed photo because she couldn’t lift the fish out of the water. She successfully netted it and passed the net to her guide, who measured it up. It was front page news in your Daily Gleaner at the time.

She ate the first salmon she ever caught – a four-pound grilse, caught on the Nashwaak. That’s no longer allowed. It’s catch-and-release now.

“We had so many salmon when we could keep them that I said: ‘I’m ready to go up river and spawn,’” she chuckled.

The couple fish together “99.9 per cent of the time,” she said.

Clark, who has a 20-year head start on Malo-Clark in the sport, has kept track of his catch. He says he’s caught 701 salmon and grisle. Malo-Clark only began counting 10 years ago, but estimates she’s caught more than 200, including 10 this past summer.

“Usually when we come back from a fishing trip, I catch more than him,” she grinned.

“It’s never competitive,” he said.

They tie their flies separately, each at an antique roll top desk in their log home. She’s good at it – so good she’s been invited to an international show in Calgary next September that will feature fly-tyers from all over the world. She was part of the International Women’s Fly Fishing organization for a number of years and is on two professional teams.

She finds fishing “a very challenging sport … and I like a good challenge.”

A retired teacher by trade, for a lot of her active career her fishing was confined to summers and weekends.

“I loved when I taught Grade 2, because they were done at quarter to two.”

She’s one of three inductees to the shrine at the Saturday night ceremonies, along with the late Michael Roy Crosby of Bedford, N.S., and Stephen Palmer of Hartland.