Small classified ads have populated the back pages of Field & Stream and other outdoor magazines for decades. I used to smile at the ones for chinchilla farms or quail eggs, red-wiggler worms or low-budget, top-secret fishing lures. I used to also smile at all the little ads for Canadian out-post fishing camps. What would happen, I often wondered, if I just picked one of them from a page out of the blue and went fishing there? I liked the idea of being on my own without a full-service lodge staff, and do-it-yourself outposts are substantially less expensive. No daily schedule; fish, eat, and sleep whenever I wanted. I can cook and clean for myself, of course, and I thought I could probably find my own fish, too, even in an unfamiliar lake as long as an outfitter pointed me in the right direction.
After a night in a comfortable cabin at the base lodge, we are on the lakeshore dock at 7 a.m., ready for the fly-in to our outpost. There’s a loud roar, seemingly right in the treetops. A Cessna 206 banks over the lake, lands on its floats, and taxis to the dock. I mentally run a list of my gear as the pilot helps us load up. This is obviously not a good time to forget anything
Our outpost boat is a 16-foot Lund skiff with a 20-horse Mercury outboard. The live minnows we bought back at base camp are now in a bait bucket on board, along with all our tackle.
By virtue of our outpost-camp schedule–that is, no schedule at all–our noon break extends into midday naps. But by the middle of any afternoon, we are ready to fish again, and having beaten the walleyes into submission in the morning, it’s pike and muskie time. Even having caught many pike over many years from New England to northern Manitoba, at Lac Seul I get totally skunked. I try everything I can think of. I get a follow once in a while. But I cannot get a pike to eat.
