Beginning of July... BOY!!!
This year I've had precious little time to get out and fish. An upcoming addition to the family has us running to catch up with that to do list that we've both been skilled at shirking in favour of an escape from dodge but now there is a very real deadline and floors need refinishing, walls need to be painted and windows need replacing... along with a ridiculous amount of purging, de-cluttering and general nesting :D
First week of July was put aside for our last trip away from home so we headed up to my dad's place in the Parry Sound/ Muskoka area. I was sure to pack some fishing time into it!
Speaking of to-do lists, I had some entries on my fishing to-do list to knock off mainly focused on exploring new water. I had two lakes in my sights, both of which I had been to once before and were deemed worthy of a second visit.
The first one I had been told had muskie in it and on my first trip, it the first bay we fished we had 3 verified muskie swipes (one of which was when I dipped a fire-tiger muskie spinner into the water boat side prior to my first cast and a half decent 'ski did it's best to crush it as I pulled out to begin my cast :ninja:
This time I was joined by my good friend Matt.
We started off working over the area I had seen the muskies on the previous visit but all we were able to muster was one hit on a mag spoon, a good swirl near the boat on a 10" walking bait and a few other flashes in the deeply stained water.
After a couple of hours churning the water with the adult film stars of the of the tackle world our wrists and backs told us it was time to go for largies (too vivid an image? :moose: )
We were assured by a friendly fellow in a big bass boat that the lake was quite safe, with not too much to worry about in regard to boating hazards, so off we went.
We spotted what looked like good largie water; trees and lumber in the water leading into a spawning bay, so we started flipping the wood with senkos and flippin’ jigs. Turns out the water was a little deeper than ideal with the tops of some of the trees over 20+FOW. We took turns hitting the more promising water in the shore-10ft range while the other pitched and prayed (mainly daydreamed) to the deep ends of the tree. At the tip of a particularly bushy tree I was yanked out of an unfocused state as what felt like a 32oz framing hammer hit my jig and tore out from the tree. After a solid hookset (thanks mostly to the fish) I loosened the drag on my Ardent Apex Grand ( ;) ) to let what we thought was the muskie we were looking for make a few good runs.
Eventually we landed what turned out to be a 38” northern with a black/purple flippin’ jig nose piercing:
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4329/...364d0fed_b.jpg
I think I had been told to move the boat for better sun direction but it kind of looks like I'm watching to not get hit by the next one that falls from the sky :fish:
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4265/...a017e595_b.jpg
That's better
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4283/...21f5e7d3_b.jpg
Then we moved into the shallower back bay and I quickly had my frog stolen by another pike. It made a pretty good show of tearing out of the shallows and exploding on the frog but still hate losing a frog...
A few minutes later Matt lands what looks like the pike that took my frog but alas, there was no frog in sight...
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4208/...9ce937da_z.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4256/...60f67c65_z.jpg
That was about it... a few largies not worthy of pics and a few snot rockets.
...
Part 2b, An unexpected return...
I got a call from my dad letting me know that their property had been hit pretty hard. By some stroke of luck there was no damage to the buildings but the driveway was in bad shape, lots of trees big and small down. He needed help if I could spare the time.
I had seen some of the coverage of the storm but was still unprepared for what I saw, must have been a series of serious down-bursts, patches of bush were totally flattened. It took us 2 solid days of cutting just to clear the driveway, when we were done I counted 32 trees down across the driveway alone, lots more down in the bush. These trees were concentrated in two "bad spots" the worse of the two being a tangle of 19 trees covering about 20yds of the drive.
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4304/...d0579785_k.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4324/...fd08d9db_b.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4301/...df59474f_h.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4297/...0be1fda3_b.jpg
Once we finally got the driveway open I thought it would be best to test it by taking the boat out to jig for some lakers :fish:
They also proved tough to find, they were hiding tight to drops off of structure and were hard to spot on the sonar. ended up going 2/5 with 3 solid hits coming one after another as one laker spit my tube and another hit it before I had time to recover, the final time I got tangled in the electric and was lucky to only loose the fish.
Of the two I landed the first was a scrappy 28"er and the other was a hard pulling chunky 32"
28er
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4309/...f0678354_b.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4300/...2ba9c912_b.jpg
They both ended up being swimbait fish.
32er
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4319/...ac44fd0c_b.jpg
Great orange accent on the fins and a notched tail
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4324/...a1b4b748_b.jpg
The release
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4312/...b1473de6_z.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4303/...677fa642_b.jpg
That's it folks, now just working on the house waiting for the next chapter to start...
When that happens, I will be taking a break from the site (hopefully not too long) but if you don't hear from me or if I don't reply to a PM it's because I've got much more important things to do! Have a great summer!
Rugger.
