Best Fishing Ever

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My wife and I and another couple spent the 1st two weeks of July on the west arm of Lake Nipissing. We each took our boats. This is our 3rd trip together, probably my 30th trip or more overall. The girls figured they would outfish us, this happens occaisionally...., so they decided to keep scorecards in the boat. Now we don't kill ourselves fishing. In fact we were never on the water before 7:00am and never fished past 4:00PM. Evenings were reserved for socializing. We also took a break to have lunch in our cottage every day and a quick nap. Two days we trolled in the afternoon for muskies and two other afternoons we went to town for groceries. Okay, so you get the picture. Anyhow, over the course of the 2 weeks we boated 369 walleyes, most of which were very nice fish. 13 were 25" or more, and probably another 30-40 were better than 20".
This was the best walleye fishing I've seen there in years, but interestingly enough not many others were catching fish. In fact, we stopped at two lodges within sight of where we were fishing just to look at the accomodations and one of them said two guys from California just left. They had a guide for 3 days and never boated a fish. The other lodge didn't believe us until we showed them a number of photos on out digital cameras, at which time they only half jokingly offered to hire us to guide.

I know the west arm isn't a premier walleye fishery, but what a two weeks. I don't claim to be the best fisherman, in fact I'm probably just about your average weekend tournament angler. My buddy and his wife just started fishing 3 years ago. We just got onto a pattern that worked, and we worked the pattern, and kept refining it, as each day the fish were responding a little differently. One advantage we had was that we communicated between boats with walkie talkies. Folks would come by and watch us pull fish, try for 10 minutes then move on. We had a huge area all to our own the entire time even though we freely offered information to others in the camp.

I don't know how this compares to the premier stops, but I am curious. We may never duplicate that again, or we may do better next year. All we were doing was pulling harnesses, but the speed and the blade size and color was absolutely critical. No more than .8 mph on speed. We were fishing any and all 25' water, and if anyone is familiar with this area that tells you exactly where we were.

So this just proves there are an abundance of quality fish in the west arm of Lake Nipissing. We took pictures and released all but a few smaller fish which we kept for 3 fish frys. BTW, I smoked my wife 106 to 105, but she read 5 books in the process. 49 more weeks until next year.

[doubleheader]

My wife and I and another couple spent the 1st two weeks of July on the west arm of Lake Nipissing. We each took our boats. This is our 3rd trip together, probably my 30th trip or more overall. The girls figured they would outfish us, this happens occaisionally...., so they decided to keep scorecards in the boat. Now we don't kill ourselves fishing. In fact we were never on the water before 7:00am and never fished past 4:00PM. Evenings were reserved for socializing. We also took a break to have lunch in our cottage every day and a quick nap. Two days we trolled in the afternoon for muskies and two other afternoons we went to town for groceries. Okay, so you get the picture. Anyhow, over the course of the 2 weeks we boated 369 walleyes, most of which were very nice fish. 13 were 25" or more, and probably another 30-40 were better than 20".
This was the best walleye fishing I've seen there in years, but interestingly enough not many others were catching fish. In fact, we stopped at two lodges within sight of where we were fishing just to look at the accomodations and one of them said two guys from California just left. They had a guide for 3 days and never boated a fish. The other lodge didn't believe us until we showed them a number of photos on out digital cameras, at which time they only half jokingly offered to hire us to guide.

I know the west arm isn't a premier walleye fishery, but what a two weeks. I don't claim to be the best fisherman, in fact I'm probably just about your average weekend tournament angler. My buddy and his wife just started fishing 3 years ago. We just got onto a pattern that worked, and we worked the pattern, and kept refining it, as each day the fish were responding a little differently. One advantage we had was that we communicated between boats with walkie talkies. Folks would come by and watch us pull fish, try for 10 minutes then move on. We had a huge area all to our own the entire time even though we freely offered information to others in the camp.

I don't know how this compares to the premier stops, but I am curious. We may never duplicate that again, or we may do better next year. All we were doing was pulling harnesses, but the speed and the blade size and color was absolutely critical. No more than .8 mph on speed. We were fishing any and all 25' water, and if anyone is familiar with this area that tells you exactly where we were.

So this just proves there are an abundance of quality fish in the west arm of Lake Nipissing. We took pictures and released all but a few smaller fish which we kept for 3 fish frys. BTW, I smoked my wife 106 to 105, but she read 5 books in the process. 49 more weeks until next year.