Fly Fishing Lake of the Woods, Ontario Canada

What an amazing Memorial Day weekend. Usually when I think of Memorial Day weekend I think of camping in wet soggy sleeping bags watching it rain/snow/sleet every day. This year wasn’t the case, we did have some decent storms, but they rolled through only at night, leaving the days just gorgeous.

I headed to Canada with Pike on the brain and knew it was going to be good, it’s Lake of the Woods for crying out loud how could it not? Well, I set myself up for absolute failure. There was a perfect pikey looking bay within a short paddle of the island we were staying on, and I figured it would be loaded with pike, and after paddling the Diablo over Friday evening I confirmed my suspicions, pike everywhere. I fished for about 3 hours that first evening and the pike wanted nothing to do with any of my pretty things. I offered them gold, silver, rubies, and emeralds only to get upturned lips at tail pushes. I was actually offended by their attitudes.

Oh yeah, the pike were in the bay, 100’s of them, in fact I was able to touch a good number of them with my rod tip to see if they were alive, and yes they were. I didn’t give up, I kept beating the water, above and below, for the next two days in hopes that just ONE of these beasts would at least give me a look. The water was clear and I was able to sight fish most of them and repeatedly watched my fly pass by nose after nose, not even a head turn. Finally on Sunday I was able to get one pike to take a swipe at my popper, I was way too trigger happy at this point and set to soon. It was fun while it lasted, and it was very cool to at least see all of these big pike lumbering on the bottom. Moral of the story, always go with the attitude that you are not going to catch anything and you can only go up from there. I have a hunch that these pike had only one thing on their minds, finding a good mate for spawning time.