The day was brisk and sunny! We got out at about 10:00. First stop was the local CO-OP to buy a license. $15 for 3 days. Sweet deal. Next, it was off to the Canadian Tire to pick up a couple of "five of diamonds", a red devil and some 30lb wire leader. We were set!
We headed up the
Ingraham trail, and our first stop was Pontoon lake. Like all the lakes in the area, it's quite pretty, and has a nice weed bed around the edge. The nice aspect to this lake was that the weeds ended right where you had road access, so we could cast. My friend was casting away, while I was getting my rod set up. It had been a while since I used a spinning reel, so my first cast didn't go where I wanted, and the slightly overspooled reel gave up too much loose line. After the retrieve, I trimmed off about 40 ft of line, and it felt much better. 2nd cast....sploosh. Damn! Not where I wanted it. Oh well. Reel it in, and then "Fish On!" A short fight later I bring in a nice sized Northern Pike! Sweet. Fishing the lakes around Yellowknife NWT should be easy!
I said at that point, "If I don't catch another fish all day, I'll still be happy." I didn't have my camera near by
so I let him go without a pic ("there'll be lots more!", I was thinking). After 20 more minutes there, we moved up and continued our drive along the trail and fished, and walked some of the trails around Prosperous, Prelude, Hidden and Tibbit Lakes. We got up to the end of the road (where the winter road would continue later) by about 1300. After fishing Tibbit and striking out as well, we headed back down the road, fishing the lakes again. We stopped at Pontoon again and this time my friend said "let me show you how it's done", and he promptly proceeded to have a nice sized pike hit his red devil. I DID have a camera for this one. Picture is here:
http://free-blog-site.com/photos/dragonspeed/picture98432.aspxFunny thing is that this fella looked almost the exact same size as mine. We both wondered if maybe it wasn't even the same fish
We continued fishing for a while, and my friend hit a fairly large whitefish, (probably a couple of pounds at least) We also got to watch a muskrat swim around the shore a bit, thinking "Boy, would it be cool to see a monster pike come up and swallow that sucker!" No such excitement.
At 1630, we had gone up and down the 80km of the highway, I had taken a few dozen pictures, and we had caught 3 fish. It was fun, and well worth it.
In the future, two things would have made fishing these lakes more productive:
1) A boat
or
2) Waders
Many of the lakes along the way had weed beds right at the shore, making casting impossible. You either needed to be in a boat on the lake, casting back to the weeds, or have waded out to the edge of the weeds, so that you could cast without hitting them on your retrieve.
We did run into some crowding on Pontoon lake, as while we were fishing another vehicle pulled up to the lake and started fishing a mere 100yards from us! The nerve
Good to be back!
Cheers.
Author
Topic: Pontoon, Prosperous, Hidden, Prelude and Tibbit Lakes - Sept 23 (Read 826 times)