After the excitement of catching my 53-inch musky on Lac Seul in 1993, we still had plenty more fishing ahead of us.
This old VHS footage captures some of the rest of that trip — including some nice northern pike, beautiful Lac Seul scenery, and a look back at what fishing in this part of Canada was like more than 30 years ago.
Watching these old tapes again has brought back memories I had nearly forgotten. The video quality may show its age, but that’s part of what makes this footage special to me. It’s a little piece of fishing history from a great trip.
We were fishing way up the northeast arm where a river was feeding into the lake. The water coming out of the river was almost 10°F cooler than the main lake water. We found some nice green weeds, and my friend George was throwing a black bucktail with a hot orange blade when he hooked into a nice 42-inch northern pike. We took a few pictures and released the fish.
We saw a lot of bald eagles almost everywhere we went. We did keep a few smaller northern pike for a shore lunch. We had brought along a big long-handled frying pan, some Crisco, and breading for the fish. One thing that was great back then was that we rarely saw another fishing boat all day long.
There is one memory from that shore lunch I’ll never forget — and I wish I would have had the camera rolling just to capture the expression on my face. George put a golden-brown piece of fried fish onto my Styrofoam plate, and the hot fish melted right through it! I just stared down through the hole in my plate at my piece of fish laying in the sand. Classic! Whose bright idea was it to bring Styrofoam plates?
My wife Dianah ended the week with a nice 39-inch pike that she also caught on a bucktail. There’s an interesting story behind the gaff hook she used to hold the fish. I bought that gaff from Joe Bucher, the famous fishing guide from Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, back in the mid-1980s.
He had a theory that gaffing a fish just under the bottom jaw might be better for release than getting the fish tangled up in a net. You could hold the fish in the water and take the hooks out. He came up with the idea of putting a keeper and spring on the gaff so the fish couldn’t jump off the gaff, as they used to call it. Plus it had a lanyard for your wrist so you didn’t accidentally drop the gaff out of your hand. I don’t think he ever sold many of them, and the gaff idea never really caught on.
By the way, I believe we ate that northern pike for dinner that night.
