Pike like mice flies, apparently.
Day
3 “The 'Secrets' of Tipping”
I woke feeling great today and hoping
to take full advantage our guide Rusty’s knowledge. I really had very few complaints about him. He was very knowledgeable about where to find
the fish, gave us all sorts of suggestions on how we could fish better, and
even took direction from us when we wanted to get closer to the shore to cast
to something that looked “fishy.” I say
I had a “few” complaints, because he “smoked like a chimney” and “drank like a
fish.” His words. Normally I wouldn’t
have a problem with this. After all it’s
his right to smoke and drink. But, one,
we had to share a boat with the chimney, and two, he drank three-fourths of
Bryce’s ninety dollar case of beer, without even asking. I suggested to Chris that Rusty had already
drank his tip.
Rusty ran Chris and me over to Secret
Lake that morning. There’s a ten minute
portage through a part of the forest that was burned back in 2005, and half of
the dead trees lay across the path, making a ten minute trip into twenty. Yesterday I had leaned on one of the upright
dead trees behind the cabin and accidentally felled it. The roots were dead. I wished the dead oak in my backyard was so
easy to fell.
Secret Lake was much smaller than
Kamuchawie, maybe a mile in length at most.
Finding the channel wasn’t hard.
Finding the walleye was. The only secret about the lake was that the fish were all small. In the
course of the morning we pulled out numerous pike south of thirty inches and
only three walleye for our shoreline lunch.
Luckily Dick and Bryce had managed to catch a few lake trout to help
out.
That afternoon Rusty got us into
some pike. Using the wisdom that the
north coves warm up faster than the southern ones, we fished all likely-looking
places. I had been having ninety percent
of all my luck fishing in-line spinners with gold blades, so I took the
opportunity to try out other lures. The
red and white Daredevil didn’t produce anything, nor did a few other weedless
spoons I tried. Then I tied on my
hammered copper-colored Red Eye Wiggler, an impulse buy at ten bucks that
everyone on the internet said was the only lure to have for northern pike. I bought three. It was much larger and heavier than my in-line
spinners so I opined conventional southern wisdom, “Big bait, big fish.”
Chris replied, “Big disappointment.” Then we started catching fish like crazy, southern style.
We made our way to Monster Cove
where thankfully Dick and Bryce were. I
say “thankfully” because they had had a rough few days on the water. Their guide, Ernest, for whatever reason,
didn’t like to get them in very deep into the coves where the pike were, and
they had spent much of their time trolling and not catching fish. To that point, all Ernest had contributed to
our group were a few extremely racist jokes, the only time he even spoke. I believe social convention still required
Dick and Bryce to give the guy a tip.
When they did, I had the same feeling I have every time I leave Pizza
Hut unsatisfied.
Anyways, Dick and Bryce were only
halfway into the cove and had already boated three fish in the ten minutes they
had been in there before us. We motored
in and Chris pulled out the fly rod and started whipping around a mouse pattern
the size of my shoe. Apparently monster
pike like big rats too. It convinced me
that with these carnivorous fish, I could take off my Nikes, attach a treble
hook, and catch lunch.
The cove was big enough for three
boats to cast comfortably, but Ernest still backed Dick and Bryce out when we
pulled in.
We said goodbye to our guides that
evening as they flew out and we settled into the idea that we were now alone,
sixty miles of trees, water, and rock from the nearest town. On the one hand, we didn’t have someone to
give us tips on how we could fish better or to take a hook out of a toothy critter’s
mouth. On the other hand, nobody would
be drinking anymore of Bryce’s beer.
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