I have just returned from my 2015 month-long trip to Eagle Lake. Each year, the experience gets deeper and better for me. Frankly, the musky fishing was generally tough from mid-August to mid-September, with huge fronts that dropped water temps dramatically followed by rapid warming and then more fronts. The fish mostly seemed to go down to depths where things were more stable. On some days, about the only fish we saw were on the locator coming up off the bottom, following the boat briefly, and then sinking down again. We jigged these fish and some had success, though I didn't catch any that way. But over all, I find as I spend more time chasing these marvelous, quirky beasts, that whether I have a grand time or not depends less and less on catching fish and more on my approach to the entire experience. At one point in my obsessive 6 AM to 9 PM fishing somebody asked for my email address so they could send me something and I had to pause for some time to recall what it was. For a person whose work entails hundreds of emails each day, that was quite a blessing. One night I was far out in the Western Arm completely unaware that a serious storm was coming in. It had clobbered Kenora with 60 mph wind, golf-ball-sized hail and prodigious lightning. The forecasters were warning people in Vermilion Bay to go indoors and stay away from their windows. I fished as the dark deepened and the sky started to take on an ominous look with distant flashes of lightning, but it wasn't until the wolves began to howl back in the forest that I decided that maybe the time had come to head for the dock. I got back at full dark with the wind rising and people sitting out on their decks at the lodge watching the lightning show. The wolf chorus seemed to me like a very good way to get my weather news. I talk to loons and eagles and turtles and have a silent, physically demanding meditation all day every day. There is nothing else I have discovered like it. The people at Andy Myers Lodge make it possible for me to experience all this, providing great service at the dock, caring for my little cabin, doing my laundry, and leaving a dinner waiting for me in the kitchen. They are friends and as close as family and it is a blessing to know them. When I have guide days I get to spend time with incredible fishermen who love the whole thing as much as I do. And there were fish involved despite the tough fishing. I caught a couple of 51s and a whole bevy of 48-49 fish. The average size seemed bigger than in other years and really big fish seemed to show up as often as 40 inchers. On the one day during my stay when the fishing was hot people in camp boated 6 fish over 50 inches. I met Mikey and his crew in Temple Bay that day and they had gotten a 53 and several other big fish and missed many more. I had seen one fish to that point in the day and was beginning to wonder if I still knew how to musky fish, but the wind rose and I went to the west tip of West Long Island and hooked the fish of my dreams. The truly big ones always eat out away from the boat and this one was coming diagonally toward me at high speed when she ate the bait. She kept coming that way shaking her huge head, white gills flared and mouth open as I reeled frantically to keep up with her. Then she jumped completely clear of the water, still coming at me, and managed to throw the hooks. The most beautiful and awful thing I've ever seen musky fishing. There was also a 56 inch class beast that I raised five days in a row in a very small area. The night of the monster off West Long I had the clearest feeling that I was going to catch this lesser, but still enormous fish, so I went to her spot at last light and raised her exactly where she should have been. She came in energetically and went into the turn and caught the bait at the outside of the turn and then turned away within one inch of eating. So much for my intuitions. That's what keeps us coming back. My last evening Herbie asked me to go out with him and several friends from Wisconsin. I got a last benediction from the lake when two fish ate at the boat, letting me finish with a 45 and then a 48 on my last cast of the trip. I couldn't be more grateful.
Bill Hedden