Beginning of July... BOY!!!

[Rugger]

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

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

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? )

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:


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


That's better


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...




That was about it... a few largies not worthy of pics and a few snot rockets.

...

[Rugger]

Next time out I headed for another multi-branched lake of which I had only seen a small part.

My main target was Largies!
The bass continued to be somewhat in a funk and after a few small fish I worked my way into a little back lake. There was a small weedy bay next to the narrows from which a few small largies showed themselves to harass my over worked frog but nothing special. Next to it was a delicious looking dock and boathouse combo; first flip over and my beaver went from a straight fall on semi slack line to an ever accelerating charge out from the dock. Tighten up and the fight is on. After a short tussle I'm putting the lip lock on my first good bucket of the season! Unfortunately I was clearly out of shape, a sharp thrash and she was able to slip from my grip and throw the hook.... poop...

I worked the rest of the docks and shoreline with more of the same 1-2#ers until finally I watched a good fish lazily swim out to take a look at my texas rigged craw... totally uninterested. I slowly continued down the shore and then 10 min later looped back to the log that the fish had come from. I tossed a weightless tex-posed senko to the spot and the tell-tail change in line movement told me I'd made the right call. This time I made no mistake and was able to land my first good pail of the season 5.1 on the scale.


And back she goes:


In between outings I was taking the canoe and paddle board out on the little lake that is in front of my dad's place, usually it is good for a few decent largies but the whole time I had no problem with numbers but they were all dinks... something was up with the bigger fish.
On the last day I finally got a good one on the swimjig with a swimbait trailer



That was it... in theory. A good way to end a final trip up. We packed up and left late Thursday the 6th of July about 20 hours before a major storm system pounded the area...

[Rugger]

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.








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
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



They both ended up being swimbait fish.

32er


Great orange accent on the fins and a notched tail


The release




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.

[Gilroy]

Very nice report on the fishing and good photo,s. Great job on the clean up,your a good man helping your old Dad out. The bright side is that you have some good firewood.

[Rugger]

Oh we will have firewood for ages!
Thanks Gilroy, glad you enjoyed the report.
There was no question about me going to lend a hand. Stubborn ol bugger would have done it all himself. As I told him he needed to be in good enough shape to hold 6-10lbs in a few weeks (you can hear my wife in the background yelling "It better be 5-6lbs or I'm going to kill you!")

[Gilroy]

Oh we will have firewood for ages!
Thanks Gilroy, glad you enjoyed the report.
There was no question about me going to lend a hand. Stubborn ol bugger would have done it all himself. As I told him he needed to be in good enough shape to hold 6-10lbs in a few weeks (you can hear my wife in the background yelling "It better be 5-6lbs or I'm going to kill you!")

Just as a side note I was in Wally Mart the other day and saw firewood in bags, exactly 7 pieces for $7.95 and I suppose taxes as well, so over a buck for single piece of wood and it was pretty small pieces, going by their prices you have a small fortune.LOL

[Moosebunk]

Great to see ya getting out still and congrats on the new addition.

All the fishing was great, those lakers take the cake though man! Sexy slob grease beasts those are. Nice!

[Rugger]

It's a Boy!!!!! An eight pounder
Thanks Bunker

[MikePal]

Wow..looking at the pics of your Dad's lane way gave me a flashback to 98... during the ice storm....my 1/2 mile lane way looked the same. It took me weeks to get it all cleaned up. Thankfully my boss was good about it and I was able to stay home.

Congrats on the new arrival, how is Mom doing ?

[Sinker]

Congrats on the new arrival, Rugger! Thats great!

S.