Sunday 7 - Limin, Bolek and I left Calgary around 9 am. The weather was perfect, sunny warm, no clouds. We reached Lake McGregor around 11:00am. wow, it was such a beautiful morning, the air smelt so nice, so fall like. We lunched our boa and off we went. We trolled along west shore without even a single bite. Limin kept saying that there were no fish in this lake etc. It was beautiful morning but totally “fish less” if one can say so. After couple of hours or so we had a nice lunch sitting on a perfectly undisturbed surface of lake. Still not a single bite. We trolled for another couple of hours, still nothing, nada, niente. Finally looking around I noticed two boats on the other site of the lake. Limin immediately suggested that we should go there so we did. When we approached the other side we stopped in about 6m of water. I didn’t want to get too close to the other boats. While we were stopping the other guys just caught a big pike. After short fight they put the fish on their chain which reveled that they already had 5 or 6 big ones. Wow, we all got excited. After my 3rd or 4th cast I saw a big fish following my spoon but it never took it. Well, at least we knew there were fish there. Shortly after that Limin experienced the same, big fish followed without a strike. Bolek suggested to move closer to weedy shore and drop a hook. i did just that. we sat in about 3m of water. Limin and Bolek were using spinning while I used a float a small dead fish. After about 10 minutes I got a big strike and here it was a big one !!!!!! Took me a while but I netted big lurker. Within next 30 minutes I got 3 more fish. The limit for pike is 3 each at least 63 cm. The first one was about 68 cm next three I let go (two 50 cm plus, one exactly 62 cm - lucky hehehe). Meantime Limin switched to my method and soon she got a big one and few minutes later another one. Bolek kept casting, he said that he likes spinning more then our method. Eventually he caught a big one too. We were fishing, catching and releasing meantime it had gotten late. I figured it would take about 30 minutes to get back, oh boy was I ever wrong. We started motoring back about 6:30 pm. After one hour we were no nearly our destination while it had gotten dark. By the time we reached our ramp it was pitch black. We could not see the shore, don’t mind the ramp. well, the situation was not too peachy. I didn’t want to run aground or hit something meantime ir was getting late, wind picked up and it was cold. We didn’t have a flashlight and could not find our landing spot. finally after few tries, using silhuats of things on shore we located ramp. By now it was windy, big waves made landing pretty tricky. I had to jump out and bring boat to the shore by hands. Next Bolek jumped out and finally Limin. While bolek hung on to the boat I went to get car and trailer. Well, it was not an easy task to backup down the ramp with very limited visibility and limitted space on ramp. On one side Bolek and boat on another Limin making sure I would not roll off the ramp. Eventually we managed to get the boat out and secure it. We made it. Cold and tired we were on our way back home, which we reached well after 10 pm.
To summarize it was a glorious fishing day but it almost ended up being not so nice one due to us loosing sense of time and my luck of imagination - no light on board, leaving so late. Well it will not happen again I think although I hope many many many days like that Sunday are still ahead of us. Check the pics.
