First multi day of the season is a wrap
Sunday at 9 am my nephew and I headed north to find fishable ice and maybe if real lucky something thick enough for the snowmobile. First stop was the cottage to pickup all the gear. Next stop was the Comfort Inn in Kirkland Lake where we spent the evening going over and making adjustments to gear. Weather was pretty depressing at this point with plus 3 and rain and almost no snow cover.
Monday morning we drove the logging roads in towards Abitibi. Temperature was -3 with strong winds and snow falling and there was more snow. The closest we could get was 14km from the lake. Logging roads were horrible with a mixture of 4 or 5 inches of snow and slush on top of wet ice. Pushed in as far as we dared pulling the trailer and parked:
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We got on the snowmobile at this point and continued the push in. Trail was mostly fine but due to the thin snow we had to watch out for rocks here and there. There were also multiple creek/water crossings that later in the season are fine but this time of year were definitely open:
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None of the water crossings were deal breakers and the Skandic pushed through all of them without any real issues. We got to the lake and this is what we saw:
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It was windy as @#$% - too windy for any kind of pop up but not really an issue as we planned this day to be essentially recon with little likelihood of doing any fishing. Got the spud bar and auger out and tentatively made our way out on foot. To our surprise we found 9 to 10+ inches everywhere we looked. And mostly black as well. We scouted and checked up to a mile out and popped a lot of holes as we wanted to be sure it was consistent. That took basically the whole day to get to a point where i was confident that we did actually have enough ice for the snowmobile if we stayed in the scouted zone.
Made our way back out and called it a day. Next day dawned sunny, calm and -16:
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Headed back down the trail and popped half a dozen more holes on foot just to be sure of things and then took the snowmobile out about a km and set up.
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Fishing was okay but not as great as we hoped. Caught a whack of Goldeye for the smoker but that was about it:
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Was a really fun trip. Put about 100 km on the snowmobile and never saw another vehicle or soul once we left the pavement. I quite like trips where you have to fly by the seat of your pants and the potential for deal breakers is real.
