My annual trout fishing trip to Temiscaming is a time I look forward to all year long..regardless weather we catch a lot fish or not.
The date is May 14th and since we were arriving smack dab in middle of a New Moon and beginning of a cold front, I know we’d at least be in for a couple of days of good fishing.
Which is exactly what happened…2.5 days of great action and then the sun and warm weather arrived and the fish went into hiding. At which point, the black flies came out in droves (Iggy was right)..but hey, I’m not complaining.
As we hit the first lake on opening day and I set up my Humminbird sonar..I was pleasantly tickled to see surface water temp was a scant 52 degrees F – quite surprising given the early spring we had. Chances were the lakes had not ‘turned-over’ completely and 52 degrees was the water temp from top to bottom!
Things did heat up a tad while we were there, but water temp stayed just below 60!
Here’s a pic of my father and Bruce on opening day, showing evidence of how cold it really was them..daytime high barely went 5 degrees C. (This meant toques were required at night for sleeping!
After boating 14 nice trout in the 13-17″ range from our first lake, we get our canoe in position for fishing ‘Lac Perdue’ on the second day..the smaller than average size turned out to be the norm for the week.
The place we’ve been camping for the past 10 years has become like a familiar friend, on the shores of a scenic but non-trout lake. The resident loons were nice to see though.
Here is my brother-in-law Steve cleaning fish by the lake shore with his special bug suit on. Everybody had one of these things but me..mine was still at home in the garage…dooh!
This photo was taken from my Bushnell Trophy Cam I had set-up over-looking our camp area. It was to monitor all unwanted visitors, but managed mostly to capture images of guys going for a late night pee.
Here is a decent-sized brookie I caught slow-trolling a Williams W55 Lite…
This dark trout was taken by Steve on our secret lake with the mysterious brook trout/QC Red trout..either way, they’re not your average strain of trout…they are very dark and many of the fish from this lake don’t even have spots. At the office, they mistook these trout for lakers.
I’ll leave you with this shot of my father in front of our tent setup, a place I consider as home away from home. In the end we had a great fish meal, lots of laughs, a few games of horse-shoes and a handfull of fish shy of our limit…no 5 pounders this year, but all in all, a pretty damn good trip!
I forgot to mention that on this trip I also presented my father with the first copy of my new book ‘Weird Facts about Fishing’ – the book was dedicated to him afterall…
