Our annual spring trip to the Park was a little different this year. My brother had health problems and couldn’t come this year and his kids bailed out because of work commitments so it was just myself and my two campers.
They also had work and school commitments but we scheduled around it and went May 7-11. The kids wanted to explore new country so we came in from the north side of the park. We crossed the big lake and our first portage was around 700 metres . I always find the first one the hardest and as years pass it’s not getting easier but I love it. We had another 2.5 kilometre portage and a couple short ones with a couple good paddles in between and we were on our lake. As the kids get older they are becoming good backcountry travellers and know what to do without telling them.
Since we were on our lake we decided to fish as we searched for a campsite and after 15 minutes I hooked a solid fish. After a lot of give and take we tried netting him only to tangle the hooks in the lip of the net with the fish on the outside! My son was netting and just hoisted him into the boat. A beautiful lake trout at 7.7 pounds. He was put on our stringer for a supper fish.We caught another smaller trout around 2 pounds on our way to our selected island campsite. It was a beauty in the middle of the lake with lots of firewood. We cooked an early supper and devoured the big trout as lunch was a granola bar on the trail. We tried an evening troll/ cast to get to know our lake but no luck.
The next morning we fished the lake hard and caught a few lakers between two and four pounds.I opened one up and it was full of juvenile perch so we started fishing back bays with 6-10 feet of water and we started catching lakers just casting and retrieving. All fish fought well in the shallower water. Another delicious fish supper that evening to top off the day.
The next day we got itchy feet and bushwhacked over a big hill to a small backlake that was supposed to have speckles. It was a 500 metre push through the bush that put some fresh scars on the canoe but the lake looked great. We fished it hard for two or three hours and not so much as a follow. We portaged back to our home lake and discovered a bay off the main lake that held a few nice lake trout. We went to bed early with plans to explore another lake in the morning.
We were up early and fished our way to the new lake picking up lakers in every back bay. We trolled around islands and open water with no success but they were certainly stacked up in those shallower bays. The new lake was connected by a narrow channel and we connected with fish immediately. This lake had an even mix of speckles and lakers bot the speckles were small with the biggest weighing 1.7 pounds.We shore lunched at this lake and fished our way back to a well deserved sleep.
The next day we portaged into a couple speck lakes to try our luck there but there were already two groups in the first small lake so we pushed into the second one but only caught one small speck. After talking to the other fishermen we found out they were only catching small trout and it felt like we were fishing used water so we had shore lunch and went back to our home lake and fished the bay we discovered the first day. We got there at five andstarted catching fish immediately. By the time we left at 7:30 we had caught 13 trout of which two were speckles. What a great way to end a trip! We had another great supper and sat by the campfire to enjoy our last evening. The kids are great trippers and fishermen and I realized they really don’t need me to do these trips anymore. They are comfortable in backcountry.
The next day we packed up early and we were out in three and a half hours and started the long drive home. We had perfect weather,decent fishing and no wind to speak of and the bugs weren’t out yet. Perfect!
Spring trip, Algonquin
