Catching Up and Ghosts of the Fall

To everyone who reeds this, I owe you a huge apology for the inconsistency of my entries. August was busy, busy, busy (with three weddings), but I did manage to spend a fair amount of time on the water. The beginning of the month was a little tough for trout, walleye and bass, but the northern on Whitefish Bay were nothing short of amazing. We blasted a bunch of them that averaged from 9-16lbs and a few that came close to the 20lb range. Whitefish Bay is remarkable for big northern and is one of Northwestern Ontario's best kept secrets for monster northern (it's the only place that I have ever found northerns in schools). Most of my success, that time of the year, comes from trolling deep diving crank baits (10ft or deeper) over top of 30-60ft of water. Deep points and deep secluded islands are usually the places to troll.

September also produced a lot of great fishing. Actually it is one of my favorite times of the year to fish. The fall generally produces good numbers of fish and gives you a great chance of catching a monster of any species. This happens because fish usually go on a big food binge before the winter months. They usually start their food bender in mid September until ice on. These cold weather months have contributed to some of my best fishing days, but this time of year can be a pain in the butt to fish because of the cold weather. You have to dress like your heading out ice fishing in order to make it all day.

October has been bitter sweet. Its always the month that I make the transition from fishing to hunting but this year I spent the first half of the month on a reserve (Kasabonki) helping my dad fly out moose hunters. We got to Kas on the Sept 15th and left there on Oct 11th. Just before we left I reset my trail cams and when I came back I was a little disappointed to find that there was very little that had moved past my cameras. Prior to leaving I was averaging around 1400 pics a month between two cameras but the whole month I was gone I only had a total of 200 pics between the two... Not what I was expecting at all. Honestly I was shattered... I have spent a lot of time putting up stands, cutting trails, and scouting and to come up with hardly anything on the cameras so close to season was depressing to say the least (I all most pulled my cameras from the two areas altogether).

The next week was just as frustrating. Byron, Kari, Tinker, and I guided a couple of moose hunters out at Krooked Lake and came up short. Over the 6 days that we spent out there we only saw two cows. The weather wasn't in our favor and it seemed like wherever we went we were always a step behind what we were looking for. There were fresh tracks on every section so shoreline that we touched but there was never anything standing in the tracks. On the last day Byron and one of the guys we were guiding went for a walk through the woods and when they came back a bull had walked between where they had parked the boat and the tree line. It was enough to make me want to pull my hair out, but it's a part of hunting. When we lose as hunters its always a tough pill to swallow (getting outsmarted by an animal with a smaller brain capacity never goes well).

When we got back from the hunt I was ready to get back in the boat and forget hunting for the rest of the year, but yesterday afternoon I decided to head out to the tree stand and check the trail cams one more time. I got out to the stand around 3:00pm and sat there until dark. At about 5:45 I saw something that looked like a doe about 300 yards away. I thought she spotted me because she wasn't moving at all. After 5min of her not moving I pulled up my scope and saw that I had been looking at a brown shrub. It's sad to say that the shrub was the most exciting part of my trip out to the stand. As I was leaving pulled the camera card out of my camera and shut my camera off. When I got home I plugged my camera card into the computer and saw that a great buck had been in the area every day this week (what was kind of depressing was that it had been standing in front of my camera an hour before I got out there).  Last night I could hardly sleep. I got up this morning at 5:30am and headed out to my ground blind at daybreak. The whole morning I froze my tail off and to make things worse I didn't see a thing. I took a short break at 11:00am, put some more clothes on, and was back in my blind at 12:00pm. The afternoon was almost as slow as the morning. I saw a fox around 2:00 and by 3:00 I had made a little squirrel my friend. I shared my Triscuits with him and in a few hours he was almost eating out of my hand (I have a short attention span). At 5:45pm I was busted. A deer got wind of me and all I could do was listen to it run of and snort at me. I didn't even get to see it but it couldn't have been more than 50 yards away when it caught wind of me. What is so amazing to me is how such large animals can be so quiet in the woods. They are just like ghosts that haunt hunters all fall and leave many of us heartbroken at the end of the year.

I'll keep you all posted on how the end of the season turns out. Thanks again for reading.    

Loonhaunt Lake

Well we are part way into July and things are starting to get a little bit uncomfortable temperature wise (at least for us Canadians). Honestly I have been praying for a day under 80 degrees for the last two weeks, but the temperature just seems to get hotter and hotter. Fishing is still good but every day seems to be a little more of a puzzle than the day before. This is normally the point of year where things get a little tougher, but who doesn’t like a little challenge (of course we all love to beat up on fish as if they were rented mules but in most cases it doesn’t happen that way).

Last week I spent most of my time out on Loonhaunt Lake with Bob and Chuck Baker and it was phenomenal. I really can’t say enough about this lake and if you’re a walleye or bass fisherman it’s a hard lake to top. The walleye fishing in the lake usually produces great numbers and the quality of fish is top notch. Actually, it is hard to catch a walleye in Loonhaunt that’s smaller than 17”. When it comes to walleye they are far from my favorite to fish for, but Loon is the exception. I usually do the best fishing for walleyes with Lindy Rigs and night crawlers. I usually use a 3/8oz bullet sinker and a 4-5’ snel line. Also, I use a worm pump or syringe to pump air into the worm so it floats a little higher off the bottom. This is a little trick I learned during my guiding on the Pipestone/Clearwater chain of lakes that converts really well to Loon. 

Bass fishing on Loonhaunt is even more impressive than the walleye fishing. The Baker boys and I laid a serious beat down on the smallmouth and largemouth. The first day we caught a pile of bass that ranged from 2-3lbs. Most of our success the first day came on wacky worms but we did catch quite a few on Zoom Flukes. We did the best around the deep cabbage weeds and on the edge of the pencil stems/reeds. Our second day we started out with wacky worms around the same type of structure but things were going a lot slower than the day before. Around 11am the wind completely died and we switched over to top water and immediately started to blast all sorts of big bass (It was like something you dream of).  For the next four hours we had some of the best fishing I have ever had in my life. It was 3lber after 3lber with the occasional 4lber mixed in.  It got to a point when Bob or Chuck lost a good fish they would just shrug their shoulders and say “I’ll get another good one in a few casts”. One of the last spots of the day (before we were chased off the lake by a ginormous lightning storm) Chuck hooked into a huge largemouth on a popper. As he was bringing it back to the boat it blew up out of the water and spit the hook. The hook came back to the boat like a missile and tagged me right in the butt (I was lucky and no barbs sank in my skin). Chuck was a good sport about the whole thing and helped pull the hooks from my shorts while Bob laughed and snapped pictures. It was a pretty humorous end to a great day. 

Something else note worthy, this week I went and picked up one of the camera cards form one of my trail cams. It was a camera I put in on the 20^th of May and I didn’t check it until last week. I had 1600 photos on it!!! I had tons of photos of deer (three bucks), about 700 photos of bears (two that sat in front of my camera for 15 hours and swatted my cam 5 times… Not cool), and one moose! The moose was the coolest by far. I couldn’t see if it was a bull or a cow because my cam only caught form its front shoulders back to the hind end (a result of my camera being spun out of whack from Yogi the Bear) but it was for sure a full grown adult. The only thing I put in front of the camera was a mineral lick I got from Tompkins Hardware called the “Rack Rock”. I don’t know how much this little thing was a part of the high traffic but as far as I’m concerned it’s a great product. 

Since I’ve been slacking in the blog entries I plan on writing another one as soon as I can. Thanks again for reading and all the support.