There is no doubt that Terence Courtoreille has a special skill when it comes to fly fishing.
In fact, he is so good at the sport that he recently won the individual gold medal at the Canadian National Fly Fishing Championship, held earlier this month in Ontario.
"This is my third time I've won it," said Courtoreille.
His previous titles came in 2006 also in Ontario and in 2010 in Manitoba.
Courtoreille believes he's the first person to win the championship three times.
"I know there are two anglers who have won it twice," he noted.
This year's championship was held from June 6 to June 8 in Centre Wellington Township, north of Guelph.
"This competition was held on the Grand River, the Conestogo River and on a private-stocked trout pond," said Courtoreille of how the competition works. "Normally what happens is the organizers will cordon off sections of the river and they're usually about 100 metres long, and we call those beats. Anglers are randomly drawn their beat. So they don't know what water they're fishing until they show up to the river that morning. And you have three hours to fish your beat and the goal is to catch as many fish as you can."
The competition is broken into five three-hour sessions and each session is on a different section of water.
"So I fished two sessions on the Grand River, two sessions on the Conestogo River and one session on the stocked trout pond," Courtoreille said.
The catch mainly consisted of brown trout.
"For the whole tournament, I managed to score 60 fish," said Courtoreille.
The 47-year-old credits his success at this year's championship to a couple of things.
"We had a really good guide to help us pre-fish the venue and to coach us and to guide us into what sort of patterns and flies that we need to use," he explained. "And then I got some lucky draws, and I can't ignore that. Things lined up for me and I'm fortunate for that."
This year, he came out on top in a field of 35 competitors.
Courtoreille said he learned how to fly fish on the Hay River and elsewhere.
"I started fly fishing when I probably was in my late teens just as a hobby and it was part of just regular recreational fishing," he recalled.
In particular, he mentioned a "fantastic" grayling run on the Kakisa River every spring.
"It's a world-class grayling run and that's an excellent fishery for somebody who wants to learn how to fly fish," he said.
And when Courtoreille went to college in Southern Alberta he also did a lot of fly fishing there.
Courtoreille – who is the director of corporate affairs with the territorial Department of Finance – has been a competitive fly fisherman since 2003 when Hay River's Mac Stark organized an NWT team for the first Canadian National Fly Fishing Championship.
"So that was the first time that I had ever competed," said Courtoreille. "And we as a team did quite well. We finished third overall in the country. So it kind of started gaining some momentum for us and picked up a lot of interest after we got some success. And I've just kind of stuck with it every year. I try to do one or two competitions a year."
Courtoreille doesn't think there is any secret to being a champion fly fisher.
"In competition fishing, the way the scoring system works you actually get more points for catching a lot of small fish versus a few big fish," he said. "So as a strategy we typically try to target those smaller fish and try to catch a lot of them within that three-hour limit. But it's still fishing and there's been a lot of sessions where I never caught a fish at all. So there's some luck involved, as well."
Next year's championship will be held in Quebec and Courtoreille plans to be there to defend his title.