One of the traditions for our annual Canadian fishing trip is shore lunch. If you don’t know what shore lunch is, it’s just what it sounds like…a picnic lunch on shore.

We start out fishing in the morning, then we all meet at the designated spot and time to cook up a wonderful fresh fish dinner. This year it was walleye, baked beans, potatoes fried with onion and bacon, cole slaw, and cookies. It doesn’t get any better, certainly doesn’t taste any better, than when prepared over an open fire and under a clear blue Canadian sky, surrounded by nothing but the sounds and sights of nature. After we’re done eating and cleaning our site (carry in/carry out…take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints) it’s back out on the water to see if we can catch our daily limit.

The ladies in our group have our own tradition that goes with shore lunch, the building of the inuksuk, a man-made stone landmark built by the Inuit people to aid in navigation on an often snowy landscape where everything can look the same. They were also built to mark sacred places.

This year we met on Buzzard Island on a mild early summer day.