Sweat equity: Persistence pays off on two very different backcountry fishing adventures

Once Wes and I got out on McNally Lake, we recognized it as the kind of classic Canadian Shield water we’d fished many times before. The peculiar shape, combined with a noticeable current, also suggested some obvious tactics: cast into the bays and around the flowing water, and run deeper baits along the drop-offs ringing both basins. The brisk wind made manoeuvring tricky, especially without a reverse gear on our little motor, but after a few unplanned groundings and ill-judged turns, I got the hang of it.

On busy water, angler pressure can drive the fish out of the most obvious spots. One of the pleasures of a rarely fished lake is that the fish are often exactly where you’d expect. Our plan paid off, and almost immediately we were landing plenty of surprisingly chunky mid-sized pike. Wes then upped the ante with a 32-inch northern, followed quickly by a 34-incher, and I started to really wonder about the potential of this secluded little lake.

By mid-afternoon, the skies were grey, and there was a slight tang in the air from distant wildfires. I was casting a big, deep-diving Flicker Shad crank around submerged cabbage weeds, near the outflow of the north basin. Annoyingly, it snagged tight, but then to my complete surprise, the snag started to fight me. Five minutes later, I was carefully balancing my weight to slide a silvery-green, 39-inch pike into our canoe. As it started to drizzle, we decided to head for the launch, then back to camp. We needed to conserve our energy, because we knew exactly what we’d be doing on our final day: trekking back to McNally.

It’s amazing how much easier a rugged hike gets when you know there’s good fishing waiting for you. We began our final day by drifting the length of the south basin, sticking decent fish all along the weedy west shoreline. Aiming big, Wes was tossing a blue-and-silver C70 Williams Whitefish dressed with a soft-plastic grub on a 3/0 siwash hook, making the whole thing almost six inches long.

It was about 10 a.m. as we finished the first drift, and I was just thinking about my Thermos of coffee when Wes plonked his giant spoon into a clump of pencil weeds. In the shin-deep water, a pike’s back broke the surface as it accelerated toward the lure, and we knew instantly it was a monster.

For a moment, there was an absurd three-way tug of war, with the fish towing us toward a nasty deadfall while Wes tried to turn its head and I furiously paddled us backward into deeper water. A lot of things could have gone wrong then, but none of them did. And under the cloudless, deep-blue sky, we landed that fish as smoothly as you can land a gator-headed, 41-inch pike in a canoe.

Improbably, during two days on an unfamiliar lake, we’d caught two trophy pike, a number of 30-inchers and dozens of two-footers. It doesn’t make for the greatest campfire story, but the fishing at that odd little lake was, honestly, pretty easy. It only got that way, though, after hours of planning, scouting, portaging, hiking, hauling and pushing harder and harder for the adventure we wanted. That was fresh in my mind a month later, as Lynn and I struggled during our final day in Manitoba.