Quetico Provincial Park - August 6 -10

I love bass fishing.....alot, so when we decided to go to Quetico Provincial Park for 4 days this August I was excited to experience some of the best bass fishing Ontario has to offer. Quetico is a gigantic provincial park on the border of Ontario and Minnesota that spreads 475,782 ha. and has some of the best bass, walleye, pike and lake trout fishing in Northwestern Ontario. There are alot of specal rules for the park:

1. No motors - no outboards or trolling motors.
2. No live bait - no worms, minnows, leeches or grubs.
3. Barbless hooks only.

We stayed at the Dawson Trail campground which gave us good access to French Lake, Pickerel River and Pickerel Lake. The first day we setup camp and got everything organized and got the canoe in the water and set out onto French Lake. We paddled to the island and casted plastics towards the shore trying to get a bass to hit, Renee caught our first walleye of the weekend about an hour later of a nice rocky point. We decided to head back to camp and have dinner since the fishing was getting slow. The second day we decided to go to Pickerel Lake and spend the day discovering a new body of water. The paddle from the campground to Pickerel Lake was about 45mins and by the time we got there we were ready to wet a line. The weather was overcast with no wind, so I was perfect for a topwater bait. I took out a Poppr and casted into shore, my first fish was a small northern pike, then the bass turned on and we caught dozens of bass ranging from 12" to 19" throught the day. Renee had good succes with a jig and plastic shiner we also tried hair jigs and the the smallmouth bass had no problem hitting those too. We probably caught 50 fish that day and by the time we got back to camp it was 7:00pm and we were hungry and ready for a nice fire.

When you are fishing out of a canoe it is alot different that fishing from a boat, here are some tips:

1. Pick your spots, remember you have to paddle and its not that easy to just pick up and move
to a different spot.

2. Don't take your whole big tackle bag in the canoe. Just take a small plastic case with a good
assortment of tackle is all you need.

The gear and tackle I used on our trip to Quetico were:

• 7' medium/light spinning rod.
• Gamma Copolymer 8lb test line.
• For tackle I brought a good assortment of crankbaits, poppers, jigs, plastics, splitshot and snapswivels.
• I also brought jig flies made by Jungle Joe and Mighty Mitch, I find the quality of these jigflies are the best when trying to land big smallmouth bass and always have a handfull in my tackle box. www.mmjjjigflies.com
• For plastics I used green pumpkinseed worms and senko's, also Emerald Shiner immitation minnows.