West Michigan Sportsmen: Canada Fishing Trip 2011

Well we completed our 2011 fishing trip into Canada. As usual it was a blast, we ate great and caught a bunch of fish. The one thing we did notice this year was that we were not catching the numbers like we usually do up there. However, the weather was very nice this time and it was pretty nice for a change. It kind of felt like everything was a couple weeks later up there since it had been pretty warm for a while and the ice had been off for some time as well.

Even though we didn't catch the numbers we were used to the size of fish we caught were much bigger than normal. We caught a lot of Walleye 20" to 25" and that is really good size for that far north. Also, we caught some really big Northerns, although we did not get over that 40" mark that we have been striving for since we started going up there. How close did we come? Uncle Ron missed it by .5" his Northern was 39.5" This tied the Northern caught by my father in law the first year we went up there, in fact it was the first fish caught of everyone.

The day my uncle caught that Northern will go down as one of my best days fishing ever. It all started with him hooking into a really nice Northern in the morning 35-37" just before I was going to net the fish it did the northern barrel roll and snapped the line at the boat. We were discouraged and didn't expect to see another fish like that. So we started to troll around the area and about about an hour later I hooked a nice 31" Northern. We took pictures, measured him and let him go. I retied my line and through back out and set the hook on another nice 30" northern. Now I was getting excited. I let him go through back out and set the hook on another big pike 32" this time. We took pictures measured him and let him go. As you can imagine I was very excited because it is hard to catch a pike over 30" let alone 3 in a row within a half hour or so. So we kept fishing I caught a walleye and then in the exact same spot I just caught the 31" and 32" I hooked and caught a 35.5" Northern. 4 Northerns over 30 inches in 45 minutes. Best day fishing for me ever.

I had not even finished celebrating my catch and my uncle set the hook. After one heck of a fight we netted the biggest fish of the trip. His 39.5" Northern weighed 14 lbs. So 5 Northerns of that caliber in about an hour to an hour and a half is not to shabby.

Ron's 39.5" Northern