Fishing in the Canadian wilderness is an unsheltered, somewhat primitive experience. This is coming from our standpoint of course. Our family takes pride in living on the bare essentials. We enjoy exploring and discovering. It is the challenge of living off the land that is the motivation to tolerate freezing conditions and thundering white caps. Our family does not hire a guide for even the biggest of lakes we travel to. However, we ALWAYS have on hand several copies of a detailed map!!

Being your own guide for a lake where no other human soul is around can prove to be very nerve-racking. Therefore, hiring a guide might seem very appealing. Although guides can be a useful resource, you should not be scared to navigate the lake on your own. The next time you plan a trip consider the fact that lake navigation is not really all that tough.

When making trip preparations, one of the first things to do, after choosing the location, is to buy a map of the lake. A company known as Map Town Ltd. sells topographic maps for pretty much every single lake in Canada. They offer maps in multiple scales. Although it sometimes takes several panels of paper to get the entire lake, my family orders the 50,000 to 1 scale because it offers more fine detail. Often you can get an entire lake on a 250,000 to 1 scale. However, this is not always better. The details on the 250,000 to 1 scale are often tougher to navigate from because of the smaller size.

The map is bought as soon as the trip is planned-this means, in a perfect world, the map should be bought a few months in advance. It is a good idea to get it shipped early for a couple of reasons: (1) it takes a few days to a few weeks for shipping and (2) because the sooner it arrives, the sooner fishing spots can be located. We tend to fish every nook and cranny of the lake until we find that hot spot (a.k.a. honey hole.) For Northern Pike, we look for rivers or tributaries that flow into bays. The inlet to the lake and outlet are always pinpointed on the map as these are usually major areas for major fish. For Pike, we look for the marsh symbol on the map because that may indicate that the lake bed around that area is muddy…which in turn possibly suggests that there may be weed beds found in that area. For Lake Trout, we look for reefs (or underwater rock formations) during the spawn. When Pike fishing, rocky areas can also be pinpointed for walleye fishing. These reefs are indicated by a cross (or a +) on the maps.

After the map is bought, you can make very good quality copies at your local FedEx/Kinkos or office supply store. These stores are also capable of resizing the maps so that you may enlarge them to an appropriate size. Another good tip for maintaining the quality of your map, and for waterproofing it, is to buy extra-large Ziploc bags to hold the maps so that they are protected. This also works well to protect them from the major fish slime of your major fish!!

After your maps are bought, copied, secured in their protective coverings, and you are sitting in your boat ready to fish, you must finally put your fears aside and navigate the lake. For the first day on the lake, we choose a shoreline to hug (North or South) and which direction from camp to head. Once the boat is out on the lake, we stay loyal to that shoreline and loyal to the map. We follow the curves on the map with the curves in the landscape itself. You should begin to memorize the islands that you pass and the reefs that lie in your path. Understanding and memorizing the landscape of the lake can prove to be a useful, and even a lifesaving, skill.

The first day we fish a specific portion of the lake by the afternoon. Then, we hit those same fishing spots (if we found any hot ones) again that evening on the way back to the camp. The next few days you can follow the same routine going farther on the lake until your party has covered the entire area you have planned to fish. Maybe by that time, you have fished the entire lake…Not too difficult eh?

Happy Navigating ~

Miss Rikki

and

Lizzy aka The Fisherbabe