After a grueling season on the Bassmaster Elite Series tour, many pros take a break from fishing to recharge their physical and mental batteries. Some of them unwind by hunting.
While I enjoy a hiatus from the stress of competition, my love for fishing never subsides. I unwind during the offseason by fishing for species other than bass. I typically do this while filming Road Trip videos for my YouTube channel, “Cooper Gallant Fishing.”
I just got home from filming a fantastic Road Trip adventure at Cedar Island Lodge in northwest Ontario. My companions included my brother Colin, Doug and Jessie Wegner, who are musky fishing junkies. Jessie’s family owns the lodge, which is on Pipestone Lake.
The lodge consists of four or five cabins and a main lodge, where we were served breakfast and dinner. They also packed lunches we took with us while fishing.
Getting to the lodge was a unique experience. We drove to a lake and took a 10-minute boat ride to a track that led up a hill. A pully system hauled our boat along the track for 300 feet over the hill and dropped us into Pipestone Lake. Then we boated another 10 minutes to the lodge.
Pipestone Lake has excellent fishing for musky, pike, lake trout and walleye. We caught all four species but focused mainly on the musky. I cast for those predatory brutes with a heavy Shimano StixX Musky rod, a Shimano Tranx reel and 80-pound braided line.
We tempted bites with 10- to 15-inch baits, including a weird curly-tailed creature called the Bull Dawg, 14-inch tubes on a jighead and a Cowgirl inline spinner.
The Cowgirl was the most effective. We would cast these heavy lures to rocky banks and shoals. A standard practice for musky is a technique called the figure eight.
After retrieving the lure close to the boat, you push the rod straight down into the water. Then you repeatedly carve a large figure eight with the rod tip several times before making the next cast.
You typically don’t see the musky until after the first figure eight. Then it rises and follows the bait. I had one 50-inch musky tail 4 inches behind my bait while I was making a figure eight. That gets your heart pumping.
I had four muskies do that, but none of them took the bait. Musky fishing is the most frustrating and rewarding thing I’ve ever done with a rod and reel.
I did catch five of them. They all attacked my bait under the surface during the retrieve. I had two that measured 49 inches. In the musky world, a 50-incher is what everyone strives for. I was so close.
The morning after my brother and I left, Jessie caught one over 50 inches.
Unseasonably warm weather prevented the lake trout from being schooled up as they normally are in October. We still managed to catch them by live scoping. They were feeding on baitfish 15 to 30 feet down in bays that were 40 to 80 feet deep.
We caught them on Xzone Swammer swimbaits and bass tackle. I opted for a Loomis GLX casting rod, a Shimano reel and 15-pound braid knotted to a 15-pound fluorocarbon leader.
As with smallmouth, the biggest thing was to keep the bait over their heads. We’d watch our baits fall, fall, fall until we saw a lake trout charge toward it. Then we’d begin winding with a steady retrieve.
Some of the lakers ate the bait before it traveled 5 feet. Others would follow it before striking. One lake trout ate the bait 10 feet from the trolling motor. They weren’t giants, but we had loads of fun catching 4- to 15-pounders.
Occasionally, we’d see walleyes on LiveScope. They were on rocky points, shoals and around cabbage in shallow bays. We’d pick them off with Xzone Rally shad minnows but didn’t spend much time with them. If you brought walleyes back to the lodge, they would clean then and cook them for dinner.
Although we didn’t target pike, we caught several of them on our musky baits.
The food, the friends, the Baker family who run Cedar Island Lodge and the fishing made for an unforgettable experience. And the northern lights were spectacular.
I’ll be posting a video of this adventure shortly on YouTube under “Cooper Gallant Fishing.”
