That must have been one big fish!
Day
7 “The Skatch”
After an unsuccessful morning of
trolling the bay to the northeast of our cabin, a morning when I snapped a bait
casting rod in half while casting (I so wanted to make up a fish story to go
along with the busted rod,) the two boats split up. Dick and Bryce ran over to Secret Lake while
Chris and I ran over to the Skatch (Saskatchewan) side of the lake to check out a skinny
cove we had pinpointed on the map. Dick
and Bryce had had success on it a few days before, and I told Chris that I
wanted to say that I’ve been in Saskatchewan.
The cove turned into a small
mud-bottomed stream with plenty of depth (3-4 feet) and no current. The stream becomes no wider than the length
of the boat. To add to the difficulty,
large boulders lay strewn throughout its course, making navigation a
nightmare. To add to that, mostly cloudy
skies and a little ripple from the wind obscured the navigator’s view in the
bow, so that we couldn’t see a boulder until it was almost under the boat.
I’ll admit that at first I had to
wonder if it was worth working our way so far into this stream until Chris
hooked and released a forty-two inch, twenty pound chunk of a northern on the
fly rod again. We would motor upstream
twenty yards, catch a few, move up again, until re ran out of real estate.
The lily pads were just starting
to come to the surface. We figured in a
few weeks the whole inlet would be choked with them and boats would be cut off
from such miraculous water. I say
miraculous because there was no way such large fish should have been in such a
tiny stream. I’m sure the forty-two
incher planned to eat the smaller pike that made their way up the stream. Since we didn’t catch many small ones, we
assumed the big ones were gorging themselves, cleaning out the creek.
Grass lined the bank and
stretched out for five feet from land, making great hiding spots for loons and
hungry pike big enough to eat them. We
got creative with our approach. Chris
tied on a topwater lure that looked like a yellow and red drift boat and amused
both of us when a big swirl in the grass announced another monster hookup. I figure that the big pike use this grass as
a garage to park tail first so they could see anything swim by and ambush it,
whether that is unsuspecting prey or watercraft.
Half-way up the stream, it
finally dawned on us to film these big pike crushing our baits. Chris shot film of me catching one on a buzz
bait while I filmed him catching one on his last red and white squid fly. This was a visual keepsake to remind us of
just how violent these fish are.
When we returned to camp, we
started a camp fire to make a vegetable stew, since the stove’s propane supply
was empty. In fact we were working on
our last tank of propane for power, which had to last us yet another
night. We had been rationing the propane
as well as possible since the first day, saving it only for washing dishes and
taking showers. We were quickly becoming
cave men.
As the stew cooked on the open
flames, Chris shot video of what can only be considered a Yeti who was pushing
over dead trees and yelling. Since the
Yeti was just over the ridge, they never got a look at me…um, er, I mean it.
Checking for footprints was inconclusive. Perhaps a you tube video will surface and
give more clues.
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