Last week I was fly fishing for Northern Pike in Ontario, Canada on Lake Esnagi. It’s a 25-mile natural lake, located north of Lake Superior in Canadian Shield region. There are no roads leading to the lake, the only access is bush plane or Budd Car — a passenger/cargo train that drops passengers on the banks of the lake.
My family has been fishing this lake since the 1960s, and I’ve fished it the last fifteen years. We stay at the Mar Mac Lodge, a series of cabins on a southern end of the lake, packing in our own food and alcohol for the week.
Guests are outfitted with Giesler wooden boats, the most perfect fishing machine for this water. These oak ribbed, red cedar planked beasts are18-feet long, equipped with a 20-horse Yamaha 4-stroke outboard.
You take a beating on this trip, fishing 14 hours a day, drinking all night long, playing cards, smoking giant cheap cigars. You wake up to the coffee pot, burbling at 6am when the generators kick on. By the end of the day, you’ve got sea legs, sun blasted… you’re stuffed with fried fish and potatoes and Molson. The skin on your email-softened hands is rough and scabbed. Your back aches from the waves banging in the cedar strip boat and your arms are tired from all of the fish.
We typically fish the second week of June, but this year we left a week earlier. It was also a late spring in Ontario — snow on the ground the week before — so the fishing was a little more difficult. Nonetheless, two fisherman would boat over 50 fish every day.
Our strategy is to catch walleyes in the morning for meat, trolling Rapalas on the rocky shorelines, and then to switch to fly fishing the bays for pike in the afternoons. You can do both at the same time — the fisherman in the back of the boat trolling while the guy in front casts a fly rod off the bow into the shore.
This year the hot pattern was “Norbit the Nuclear Mouse” — a fly constructed of a 2/0 Gamakatsu stinger hook, brass eyes, yellow estaz chenille, flashabou and some Icelandic sheep wool I found in the Caddis Fly bargain bin. It’s basically a rip off of my brother’s original pike fly “The Carpet Muncher” made out of antron body fur and crinkly synthetic streamer fur. According to Larry Dahlberg, if you spend more than five minutes tying a pike fly you’re wasting your time.
Tied with monofilament instead of thread, the fly is nearly indestructible and fishes even better after fish hit it, (there is a point of diminishing performance after about 10 fish). It’s about 8 inches long, but doesn’t weigh much. Looking at pike flies, you’ll notice that the hook point is very near the front of the fly — but you don’t get short strikes. Pike swallow 8-inch flies whole or hit them head first, hooking is not a problem.
I fished the entire week with a Winston BIIx 8-weight rod and the new Rio Gold line. It was a perfect combo for this trip and I landed pike over 20lbs on this outfit. It’s stiff enough to battle big fish out of the timber in shallow water, but the action near the tip of the rod is slow enough to take the work out of casting. I had a similar experience fishing a 6-weight BIIx a couple years back for bass, casting deer hair divers all day long. The rods load great with a larger fly and once you get into the rhythm, it does all the work for you, turning over an 8-inch fly with ease.
My one complaint with the Rio Gold line was how the stripped line winded into giant knots at my feet. It’s a supple line, great for casting, but it seemed to twist in on itself if I let it pile up on the retrieve. We tried makeshift stripping baskets, using recycling bins in the bottom of the boat, but it didn’t work. If you have a good stripping basket system, I’d recommend using it if you do a trip like this.
For a leader, we have been using 8 feet of straight 20lb fluorocarbon for years with no problem. I have been bit off maybe 10 times in ten years of fly fishing for pike. They have massive teeth, but a hard, high test fluorocarbon stands up really well, whereas a wire leader ruins your cast, spooks fish, and takes a lot of action out of the retrieve.
Speaking of teeth, a few words of pike removal: Removing your hook from an angry pike is an indelicate business. The encounters can often leave you more mangled than the fish. The best way to dispatch a fish in my experience is to slide your index finger under the gill plate while the fish remains in the water. At the junction of the jawbone and gillplate, there is a pressure point where you will feel a pulse. Squeeze with your thumb and the pike will stop thrashing, often opening its mouth so you can work on the fly. This is called the Leech Lake Lip Lock. It’s a great, safe way to handle these fish without getting bit or impaled. You should also know that a fresh pike is covered in a protective slime and it really stinks, so keep them in the water if possible.
You actually get scared when a big pike hits — it’s man against pike. These fish are different, more sentient than other fish. They’re cruising the shallows, looking, skulking. They’re more like a dog that you have to fight off, hand to hand combat style. They are aware of you — big enough to actually be fighting you — not the thing in its mouth. Pike bite the shit out of more people in our group, it’s the number one injury on these trips. I’m not saying they are trying to bite us, but I am saying that they don’t pass up the opportunity if you’re giving it to them. My brother says pike have a personality and you always remember the big fish.
I caught my biggest pike on the fly this year, 43-inches with the tail pinched. My dad had set me up in the back of the lake at the inlet of the Magpie River where the smaller, male walleyes were leaving their spawning grounds to come back into the main lake. A giant pike glided out of the reeds and swallowed up my yellow fly, and kept on going as it hadn’t felt the hook yet.
Then I slammed the hook set. The pike moved into the middle of the river channel (thankfully) where I had some room to work with it. It was huge and powerful, but tired. I could see the redness on her bottom fins from spawning, she was just exhausted. There is no way I could have landed that fish two weeks from now, not in that short water. She tolerated some measuring and photo-taking and went back into the water and swam off. It was the biggest pike we’d seen all week, though everyone in the party landed a fish nearly 40-inches.
My brother had a 38.5-inch fish in a shallow bay wrap him around logs twice, but we could reach the logs under the boat, pulled them up out of the water and cleared the line and actually landed the fish.
In addition to pike, there is a nearby hike-in lake for giant brook trout. My brother and I parked the boat at the trailhead and hiked into Rock Lake, where a small aluminum boat waits at a dock. I fished a six-weight Sage Z-Axis with a sinking 7-weight line and a cone-head rabbit strip streamer, picking up two giant brookies in an hour off a submerged rock pile in the middle of the lake. Photos below.
Stay tuned, we’ll be posting a video of highlights from the trip this week. -Matt Stansberry
