Remembering Muggsy Holmes
Monral Boyd Holmes died on November 10, 2018 – he was 75. My old Nelson gang is getting very sparse these days -not many left. Like many of us, Mugs hadn’t lived in Nelson for years. He was living in Olalla, a conglomeration of trailer parks and small farms near Keremeos, when he passed away. Before that he had been on the coast mainly working in sawmills. Tahsis, Victoria, Shawnigan Lake, Port Alberni and Ladysmith. He tired of the rain and went to Olalla to get away from it.
It must have been around 1953 when Mugs and I first met as Nelson boys. Fishing was what interested us the most and we spent lots of time prowling the local spots like the City Wharf, the City and Walton’s boathouses and the mouth of Cottonwood Creek. I can especially recall the good days we had at Cottonwood. It’s so different now that the dump, landfill and air strip have overtaken it and messed up the area around it where there was once Chinese Gardens, a sawmill, skating ponds and a hobo jungle.
We started fishing at low water in the early spring where the drop off to deep water was right at the creek mouth. We used worms or stonefly nymphs that we carefully threaded on small bait hooks. We attached one or two small split shot sinkers and fished “ Muggsy style” letting the bait out as natural as possible. Mugs was truly an expert in thinking like a fish. He imagined that the Cottonwood rainbows were poised just over the drop off waiting to sample any thing that came along in the creek outwash. But it had to look right or they would pass up. So we cast upstream a few meters into the creek and let our bait kind of roll down the drop off in a most natural way. Mugs was right. We caught fish and some real good ones – hard charging rainbows to four pounds. But boy were they fussy. We would feel frequent electric taps as the bait worked down the drop off face. The temptation to set the hook was strong but by the time you jerked, the fish was gone. You had to wait until the fish hooked themselves or swallowed the bait. It was hard to resist the bites but eventually we landed a few.
Later on in the spring and summer, we fished from my granddad’s little boat around the Nelson waterfront and caught lots of silvers in June when the water was up. I remember how Mugs used to piss me off by repeatedly spitting in the boat. “You have the whole lake to spit in so why spit in the boat”? Grandpa Burns was a stickler for cleanliness and I was sure we would lose the use of the boat. But he helped me wash it out and no one was the wiser.
The other thing Mugs and I shared was music. I had just been given a guitar and was taking lessons. Mugs was a natural musician and scoffed at my lessons. He had an older guitar and could play it well. He knew all the popular songs of the day: Elvis, Bill Haley, Eddy Cochrane and could imitate Elvis to the tee. In later years he performed as an Elvis imitator and played in a band that did all the old tunes. I used to have an LP of Mugs and his band but lost it.
Mugs dad died in 1954. He was hit by lightning near Kaslo. So his Mom was left with Mugs and his older brother Don – two lively and rambunctious boys to feed and nurture. She worked two jobs to keep the lads going and it must have been tough. She was a maid at the Hume Hotel and a ticket agent at the Civic Arena. She was very protective of her boys and if Mugs and I were late getting home she was on the phone immediately “Burns, where’s my boy”? Mugs could look after himself and if he ran into something or someone he could not handle there was his brother Don who was feared around Nelson.
I left Nelson in 1958 and Mugs and Don left not long after – Mugs to work and Don to play hockey. It was quite a few years before I saw Mugs again. I had written a fishing story for BC Outdoors. Mugs saw it and called the magazine to get my address in Lake Cowichan. From then on we resumed our adventures but this time on t he Island. We fished at Cheewhat and Sprise Lakes and the Nitinat River where we dodged black bears to land some big Chinooks. We also fished some lakes around Port Alberni when you could still get into the woods around there. We were looking forward to fishing some of the productive small lakes in the Okanagan Hills but left it too late.
Mugs at Cheewhat Lake.
Mugs at Toy Lake