Ah the Manly: a once-a-year spring gathering of male fly-fishing enthusiasts to some remote — or not so remote — fly-fishing destination in southern British Columbia. The Manly has been in existence for many years now, but 2005 was the first one I had attended. The winter had been short and word was out that few, if any, of the interior lakes had winterkilled. With that information at hand it did not take long for the Manly co-ordinators to decide that the location for the 2005 adventure would be the Roche Lake area near Kamloops, and it was there that 17 Manly men descended for an extended weekend of chest-beating, beer drinking and fly-fishing in May.

From midweek on, members of the Manly trickled in for two days, until the entire campsite was basically taken over for the weekend. Seeing old friends and meeting new ones was great, but the best thing about it was that the stories were true; the snow pack had been less than average, ice-off had been early and winterkill had been non-existent. I have only experienced one other season like it in that area, and with that knowledge I grabbed my buddy Clive and took off hell bent for Frisken Lake. The last time I fished Frisken after a short winter, the fishing had been fantastic and I was hoping that it would prove to be the same this time around.

Frisken is a shallow, medium-sized lake around 29 hectares (72 acres) in size; its deepest point is only 10 metres deep. The B.C. Freshwater Fisheries Society stocks it annually with about 8,000 rainbow trout and, as a bonus, for the past three years the stocked trout have been triploids, which means they won’t spawn, so they are silver and feisty all season long!

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