Fishing in Ontario

Well, I finally have consistent internet access, at least on the weekdays, as I have officially started working in lab. But, before I get to that, I should digress and make a few posts about fishing in Canada, and my first few days in France. So, on with Canadian fishing.
We normally fly our own floatplane up, but the weather outlook wasn’t encouraging and ceilings were low with poor visibility. So, we hopped in the car, and drove the 10 hours up to West Caribou Airways, which is about 15 miles away from the camp on Savant Lake where we stay. We left about 6:30am and arrived in time for West Caribou to dump us into Savant before dark. The weather sucked, and we never would have made it had we attempted to fly. Not that we would have crashed, we just would have had to turn around. In all honesty, the weather wasn’t really good enough for them to fly us the 15 miles in, but they did it anyway. I’m not usually apprehensive in any airplane (other than once in a POS twin engine Cessna in the Bahamas that I though was going to come apart midair) but I was a little nervous. We took off and the ceilings couldn’t have been more than 400-500 ft. But, I guess that’s why bush pilots earn their living. We skirted the clouds (and trees) and did some low flying down the lake and safely made it into camp. We even arrived in time for Mike and I to go out and catch one nice northern pike to eat for dinner. (Although, we only fished for 30 minutes) Our first day of fishing was exceptional and we nearly filled up on walleyes. We probably caught three times our limit, but caught so many big walleyes in the slot size (where you can only keep one) we threw most of them away. I really don’t remember another day when I have caught so many big fish. I also haven’t been quite so cold as that day in a long time. I had 5 or 6 layers on and was still cold. The next two days we focused more on catching northerns and lake trout and had less luck. We still caught walleye for dinner along with some nice northerns, but only got three lake trout. I had one follow my rapala up while I was casting for northerns in a spot we would never have decidedly fished lake trout, but once he saw the boat, that was it. I also hooked a big (10-12lbs) northern while fishing for lake trout (55ft deep in a lake trout spot) but we had a little trouble netting him and I lost him at the boat. Not a big deal, though. It was most likely in the slot size and would have gone back anyway. Still fun to fight. So, all in all, it was a great trip. Fun to spend some time with the family, great to be miles from nowhere in the Canadian bush, and I can’t complain about the fishing.





Me driving the boat.

My brother with one of many nice walleyes.