different sizes into tanks for retail.
Both of Larocque’s shoulders are wrecked. He requires surgery on them to repair damaged ligaments. Larocque is in no rush to get the surgeries. That day will come, but not while there are minnows to be trapped and sold.
“I’ll get my shoulders fixed when I retire when I’m 85,” Larocque said while laughing and winking. “The minnows are needed. There is always a demand for more. I can never get enough. I always have to be out getting minnows.”
On this day, Larocque can feel the pain in his shoulders. He finishes combing his grey hair and gives his left shoulder a rub with his hand. He is anything but regretting go outside into the chilly darkness of the morning. He is eager to go.
It’s cozy in his 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin in the wilderness. A fire crackles in the wood stove. Bacon and eggs sizzle in a pan on a propane stove. Coffee steams from a pot.
A big breakfast is a must for Larocque. It sets the tone for his day. A day that will run 14 hours if all goes right. He gets into his truck and drives down a logging road. He unloads his snow machine and trailer with all his gear and a big drum.
Thirty minutes later and Larocque is driving the end of a 36-inch chainsaw into the ice of a frozen lake. Water and snow and chips of ice fly through the air. It is below freezing and the wind is
howling on this day in Northern Ontario in early March. Larocque, working bare-handed, makes quick work of the ice and cuts a three-foot-by-three-foot hole. He breaks up the ice with a homemade chisel made out of rebar.
He firmly grips a yellow nylon rope tethered to a broken branch stuck in the snow and gives it a tug.
A smile cracks across his face.
“This has got some weight,” he says. “That’s what I want.”
Larocque pulls up one of his homemade steel mesh traps and it is a squirming
blur and mess of hundreds and hundreds of minnows and suckers. He checks all his traps and fills the 45-gallon drum half way with water and bait. It was a good day. It was a day he wanted.
“Getting bait is a lot like fishing. There are bad days and there are good days. You are grateful for the good days,” Larocque said.
“I’ll get my shoulders fixed when I retire when I’m 85,”
Richard Larocque first started trapping bait to fish when he was 17, nearly 46 years ago.