Northern Trails Adventures in TV Fishing By Gord Ellis
Like a lot of anglers, I grew up watching fishing shows on television. I’m old enough to remember the early ones like Bill Dance Outdoors, Fishing with Roland Martin, In-Fisherman and here in Canada, Red Fisher’s Scuttlebutt Lodge. For a kid from northwestern Ontario, those shows were windows into a fishing world that was barely imagined. Whether it was fishing for giant largemouth bass in Florida or flying into the Northwest Territories for massive lake trout, these shows took you there. In the days before specialty channels and YouTube, watching fishing shows on network TV was your only option. My first foray into the TV fishing world was as a host of the Superior Fishing Show, in Thunder Bay. I can’t recall exactly how it came to be, but the writing and radio career was already underway, and someone must have thought I could do it. What this writer quickly learned was that making television fishing content was way more difficult than it looked on the tube. For starters, you always had to worry about the weather, and that was a pain. Too much wind was not good for the mics and rain was no good for the cameras. If it was too sunny the shot was potentially overexposed. Another major issue was the catching of fish. On a fishing show, you want fish. That did not always work out as hoped. Then there were the batteries. Everything had batteries and you lived and died by them. This lesson was learned the hard way on one of my very first fly-in television fishing shoots in the early 1990s. A guest and I, plus the cameraman, were flown into Ogoki Lake, north of Armstrong, for a five-day shoot. The weather looked great and the fishing was known to be good. The outfitter dropped us off at the outpost camp, we quickly unloaded and then waved excitedly as the Beaver disappeared over the treeline. A few moments later, the mood changed. A lot. “I don’t have the batteries,” said the slightly frantic cameraman. “I left them in the truck.” For the next few hours, we tried to figure out a way to get some power to the camera, including—as I recall—trying to start a diesel generator that looked to be from the 50s. No dice. So, we went fishing without the TV camera for five days and it was pretty great. When the outfitter landed and heard we had no batteries, and therefore no show, he was less than enthralled. However, I supplied him a bunch of still photos that populated his brochures and 32
DECEMBER 2021
[ABOVE] Gord Senior with cameraman
Mike Hehner in 2019. | GORD ELLIS [LEFT] Mike Hehner shoots as Gord
Senior releases a fish. | GORD ELLIS
cameraman was a dedicated soul and kept the rather heavy camera on his shoulder for hour after hour, day after day, for the whole four-day shoot. He wanted to capture a muskie grabbing a lure, so he had to be rolling on every cast. He burned up hours of tape and could barely walk straight by the end of it. We never did get a muskie.
show booths for many years after that. My hosting on Superior Fishing ended after a couple seasons, but that experience morphed into doing the occasional guest spot on other shows. Winnipeg angler Don
NORTHERN WILDS
Lamont had a show called the Complete Angler, and he invited me on quite a few shoots. One I’ll never forget was filmed on Lake of the Woods in the mid-1990s. We were supposed to be chasing muskie, but they were not cooperating. Lamont’s
More recently, I’ve had some interesting TV shoots with some of the best people in the business. A favourite memory took place in July of 2019, when my dad, Gord Senior, and I were the guests on the Lund Ultimate Fishing Show. The show is produced by Lindner Media, which was founded by angling legends Al and Ron Lindner. The cameramen for the show were Mike Hehner and Rich Eckholm, two of the most experienced people in the business.
