My Watermark is Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

I learned to fish – my grandfather who is still my hero though dead and gone - he taught me to fish when I was 3 years old. He would take me out to the brook and we would sit under this tree and it would take a piece of willow and we would put white shop line on it and tie a safety pin to the end and I would stand there and sit for hours and he would sit under the tree and just watch me fish.

One day he got me distracted and he had this little fish because we keep little trout in our water wells because trout would keep your well clean from insects and whatever. He took this trout from the well, and what he did to it years later, and he put it on my hook, and I thought I caught the fish, and I was all excited, because he flicked it back and so “oh I think you caught a fish”. I would pull it in and I loved the fish so much that I slapped it right away, the ugly little thing. That was my pop. This was in Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, in my home town when I was a little girl. It was just a little brook that ran down by our house.

The first time I actually caught a fish on my own, it was that same brook, and you could hike the brook for about two miles. My brother Tony, 18 months older than me, he was teaching me how to fish with a real fishing rod, little bamboo pole. Little fish were on it, 4 inches long. He said “when you get a fish and when you get a bite you gotta yank on the rod”. So I yanked on the rod and the fish went up back behind me in the woods. We looked for it for two hours and we never did see it.

Since then I’ve caught all kinds of fish – salmon, halibut, mahimahi, all kinds of tropical fish. Last year or the year before we went to Guadalahupe in Cuba and we fished the mangroves and we caught all kinds of fish and it was just so exciting. I love fishing.