I Caught the Biggest Fish!

Guess who caught the biggest fish so far this week?!?!? Well, it happens so infrequently that I have to brag about it. I did! It was not a walleye, or even a northern pike, it was a lake trout! I have not caught one in years and for that matter do not fish for them as the ones around here are few, far between and hard to target.

Pasha Lake itself only has two game fish in it, northern pike and lake trout. And since this week was filled with rain almost every day we stayed close to camp and only went out when it looked like there was a little break in the rain. On one such break Barb and I went out on Pasha in the hopes of catching a lake trout. To catch just one is considered a successful day. So off we went with a few shiner minnows and our poles rigged with jigs. Since these fish are so few and far between in this lake we try to target them. Meaning you go slowly along the lake shore watching your sonar graph, when you see a fish you stop and try and catch it.

So round and round we go, looking for a fish. This is what they look like on the graph. Well, not exactly like this as this is an image of several walleyes in one of our honey holes. A single lake trout would be a single “arch-type” image whereas this picture has 6 or more fish on it.

We would find a fish, usually in 30-40’ of water, and try and drop a minnow near it and see what happens. We were out for over an hour when it finally happened, fish on! I cannot tell you the last time I caught a lake trout…. Oh wait, I can, it was in 2016 while in the Yukon, but anyway, I had one on now!

We finally get it to the boat as Barb is manning the net, she takes a swipe it and misses! If I did not know any better I would have thought she was trying to knock it off! But she got it on the 2^nd try and heaved it into the boat. Then it started pouring again so we hustled back to shore and to our cabin. I had Barb take a picture of me with it, cleaned it and put it in the freezer. Later I looked at the picture, I was soaked, pale, had ½ of my shirt tucked in and ½ out, a dead pan expression on my face white pale face that looked like I should be on a table in a morgue instead of standing up holding a fish. So….. no picture for the blog. I will not torture you with that image but it really happened, trust me!

We had two days we barely left the cabin it rained so much and two days we snuck out between storms to fish and two days bear hunting. We caught another limit of walleye and had another fresh walleye dinner. So far we have had them pan fried, deep fried and grilled.

Nice stringer of 'eyes

Speaking of hunting there has been a blog post floating around in my mind for a couple months now that I did not know if I would ever write or not. For those of you who have read our blog for a while you know we tend to stay away from controversial topics like politics, religion, and more recently vaccines. I want our blog to be fun, informative and a record of our adventures, not controversial.

But the blog post started floating around in my head after I watched a Netflix documentary a few months ago called Stars in the Sky: A Hunting Story by Steve Rinella. (That link is a link to his trailer, this link will take you to the actual documentary on Netflix) I have been a fan of Steve’s shows for years as his philosophy on hunting closely resembles mine where it is almost more of a spiritual experience more than anything. For those of you how don’t hunt, I would strongly encourage you to watch it if for nothing else but to give you a perspective on the hunting culture. For those of you who do hunt, I think you would enjoy it as well. There is not a lot of blood and gore in it so I think it would be safe for hunters and non-hunters alike. Make sure you have some time, like maybe on a rainy day as it is a little over an hour long. I am not trying to change any opinions here, but for me it was very moving.

As long as I am writing about things I don’t usually write about……We don’t usually talk about our health and ailments on the blog either, (unlike other people we know who have to describe in excruciating detail every little thing that goes on with him, usually with pictures that no matter how hard you try you just cannot unsee!) but.... Barb also had a little health scare this week when she had a she started seeing “floaties” and flashes of light in her right eye. We had a friend recently who had a torn retina and we were afraid the same might be happening to Barb. What to do?! We are in Canada hours away from anyplace that takes our insurance. Barb called a couple of retina specialists in Duluth, MN (6 hours away) and they said it could be a retina in the early stages of tearing and she should get it looked at. Do we pack up everything and go down there to get it checked out? She thought about going by herself, getting it checked out, and then getting another covid test so she could come back. But the earliest appointment was not until late Sept. Then she thought; Why not go to Thunder Bay here in Ontario to an ophthalmologist and get it checked out there? We have a high deductible insurance policy so it would be out of pocket no matter where we went. So she called down there and got an appointment for a couple days later. So on the appointed day she was off to Thunder Bay. She did not want me to go because she did not want to leave the dogs alone that long.

When she got there she said they took 6-8 scans of both her eyes with this machine she had to stare into. After a bit a doctor came in and went over the scans with her. She does not have a torn retina. She has a tear of some word she cannot remember or pronounce but it nothing to be worried about. He said the floaties and flashing lights would go away in a few days.

Then it came time for the bill. Ugh! How much is this going to be?!?! My guess was $1,200. Chad’s guess was $1,500. Barb walked up to pay the bill….$75! In the states that would have easily been over a $1,000. Regardless of the cost, Barb is okay and we can continue our Canadian adventures!

So it is back to the bear blind we went! Barb and I have now spent so much time in the bear blind we are starting to go loopy. I don’t know how many books she has read, maybe like a dozen, I have read maybe 2-3. She reads them on her iPad while I read them from an actual book. She is like a speed reader and I cannot help but see her flick the pages out of my peripheral vision. I will be reading a page and she flicks like 8 pages to my one, it is actually very distracting and somewhat annoying. Who reads that fast!?!?

Then there are the times a start taking pictures and whisper “Give me a serious hunter pose”

Then “Give me a I wonder where the bears are pose”

Then, “Give me an “I am looking for a bear pose”

Then she starts cracking up and gets the giggles and I am whispering to be quiet, the more I whisper to be quiet the more she giggles! No wonder we are not seeing any bears!

This week at Pasha my good friend Bob, (Not Farmer Bob but Farmer Bob’s son-in-law’s dad and my high school buddy, Bob) came up with a groups of his customers, a total 6 guys. This is his 7^th year coming up with his customers, some of them the same, some of them different and they are here to have a good time! One thing I noticed each night they were here is that the number of times I had to get up and go to the bathroom each night directly correlated to the number of beers I had the night before. 3 beers, 3 times getting up, 4 beers, 4 times. I wonder if I had 12 or even 17 beers in one night if I would have to get up that many times....... I will have to ask Dino! 

They fished everyday regardless of the rain, mostly all day and caught tons of fish. They have two favorite lakes; Onaman, which is the 1 ½ mile walk-in walleye lake and a northern pike lake that will remain nameless which is a 4 mile ATV ride into it. 

A trophy northern pike is anything 40” or better, if you hit that mark you know you really have something special. Not only did they hit that mark once but they hit it 4 times!

Now that I think about it, I did not catch the biggest fish after all!