For Paul Millan, a financial plan-ner with Royal Bank of Canada, enjoying Canada’s great outdoors as a hunter and fisherman is about more than simply catching something to brag about or to bring home. “With the busy-ness of our office, the phones and the emails and the faxes,” says Millan, “it’s nice to be able to disappear from that for a day or two, or a week at best, and just enjoy getting some fresh air and being with friends and trying to catch a fish or two.”
Spending time in the outdoors has been a lifelong passion for Millan. The longtime advisor, who lives in Beausejour, Man., first went fishing when he was about six years old with his two younger brothers and his father. Says Millan: “We’d set the alarm clock for six in the morning and say: ‘Dad, let’s go. We have to go fishing. You have to take us’.”
Millan, who has worked with RBC for more than 20 years, now fishes year-round with family and friends. Indeed, some of Millan’s best fishing memories are of being on the water with his nine-year-old daughter, Julia, and some close friends.
On these outings, Millan likes to try for goldeye or mooneye, small but popular sport fish native to eastern Manitoba. “When we get [the kids] into the boat, it’s fun just to watch their reactions,” says Millan. “It’s the kind of fishing that’s fairly active — when they’re biting, they’re biting — and you get a lot of action, so it keeps the kids really interested.”
For Millan, the season doesn’t end when the lake freezes. He is an avid ice fisherman and says there’s little to compare with quiet moments spent sitting in front of an open fire on a frozen lake, watching Julia and her friends skip with the ropes that tie down the load on the snow machines that Millan and his friends use to travel on the ice. “There’s three feet of ice under you,” he says. “You feel pretty safe.”
Not every fishing trip is a family affair, however, and sometimes the memory is all about the fish he has caught. In 2006, Millan was fishing in a small creek when he thought his hook had snagged on a log. In fact, he had caught a 4.25-kilogram (9.5-pound) walleye, a.k.a. pickerel, that was 74.9 centimetres (29.5 inches) in length.
“It was the biggest one I ever caught,” he says. “The strength that I felt at the end of the line was pretty incredible.”
Millan’s other outdoor hobby, hunting, is something he typically does only about once a year, but it still gives him a chance to catch up with friends and enjoy nature. Every year, Millan and a few friends charter a plane and rent a satellite phone for a week-long moose hunting trip. The annual excursions are always in Manitoba, and their camp is usually about 32 kilometres away from the nearest road. Millan and his friends get back to basics by sleeping in a tent with a wood stove.
Although most hunting trips are for moose, one exception was a 40th-birthday present Millan gave to himself a few years ago: a trip hunting caribou. Millan was based at Manitoba’s Bullet Lake, about 13 km south of the Nunavut boarder. To get there, he drove eight hours to Thompson and then flew for three hours in a small bush plane.
A large part of the appeal in travelling to these remote areas and being in the outdoors is to witness first-hand the “beauty and the brutality” of nature, Millan says. He recalls, for instance, keeping watch for moose from a tree stand in a marshy area and seeing two geese flying at full speed over the trees, chased by an eagle. The geese suddenly swerved, diving straight into some bulrushes in a bid to escape. “If you’re sitting in your office, you’re not going to see that,” he says. “If you’re sitting on your couch, you’re not going to see that.”
Taking part in outdoor sports is also about more than spending his time out on a lake or in a forest. In 1997, Millan helped to start the Brokenhead River Game and Fish Association in Beausejour. As a member of that foundation, he also is a representative of the Manitoba Model Forest’s Co-operative Committee for Moose Management.
Millan also is an instructor for the Manitoba Hunter Association and acts as a mentor and instructor for youth who are interested in learning about the outdoors.”I try to give a fair amount of my time back to wildlife, nature and conservation,” he says. “That’s what I pride myself on being able to do and to help out with.” IE