Memories of Lake Toxaway

Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: June 2024

We buried my Aunt Ruth Osteen in Brevard last month.

You’d have liked her. I know this because everyone liked her. She was a positive force of nature who could build a lifelong friendship just by asking you about your day.

She was preceded by her husband Fred Osteen, who’d probably be better known to our readers because of his real estate work in Toxaway and Sapphire. A natural raconteur, Fred could charm the birds right out of the trees, as the Irish say.

He worked for Reg Heinitsh and Donny Boyd during the rehabilitation of Lake Toxaway and went on to help Boyd develop Burlingame.

Fred introduced young Luke to the wonders of fishing at Lake Toxaway, an occasion that lasted all of 16 minutes and left me with a lifetime aversion to fishing of all types.

Let me take you back to the halcyon days of my childhood, when a fishing expedition with Uncle Fred was to be the pinnacle of a strange summer marked by random surprises and confounding mysteries.

I’d never before fished, and I could barely contain myself as Uncle Fred launched our aluminum canoe onto the dark waters of Lake Toxaway.

Fred patiently demonstrated how to smoothly cast a line 50 or 75 feet from our canoe and I tried to reproduce his technique with a couple of throws of about 20 feet.

Sophocles tried to teach us that hubris is twinned to our occasional triumphs and our spectacular failures. At that stage of my life, I hadn’t been introduced to the Greek tragedies.

Wanting to duplicate the nonchalance and obvious power behind Uncle Fred’s easy casting, I mustered every ounce of muscle and will in my skinny body and cast my line out to the deep waters where the big fish were lurking – only to watch in horror as my rod and reel arced gracefully end over end, gently splashing 20 feet away.

Compounding the disaster, I automatically lunged to recover the errant rod, somehow assuming that my arms could stretch out over the distance like Mr. Fantastic in The Fantastic Four.

This destabilized the canoe, and Uncle Fred instinctively threw his weight in the opposite direction, instantly consigning his tackle box, which had been balanced on his knees, into Davey Jones’ Locker (or, more accurately, Reg Heinitsh’s Locker).

We came ashore and went home – me in utter humiliation, Uncle Fred, somehow energized by the whole event: “That’s a once in a lifetime event, Luke. That means for the rest of your life you’ll have incredible luck.”

I’m telling you this to remind you that fishing at Lake Toxaway is pretty wonderful now.

Lake Toxaway is big, and its waters can be really deep. It’s home to healthy populations of brown and rainbow trout, large- and smallmouth bass, bluegill, walleye, and some enormous, bordering on scary, catfish.

Naturally, you’ll need a license, and you can buy one at Headwaters Outfitters, Brookings Anglers or Highland Hiker.

Or, if you’re looking to recreate the Young Luke Experience, you can just paddle out to the deepest part of the lake and pitch everything overboard. It only takes about four minutes.