EDITOR’S ANGLE
The freshwater race is on. PHOTO: SCOTT MACGREGOR
Overland adventure with huge potential
TWENTY MILES as the crow flies from my front porch is a blue hardcover notebook on a white pine table, in a mossy log cabin overlooking a small lake. On the first page of the notebook it reads: “Welcome to our fishing camp. Please leave the camp as it was and treat it like it’s yours. Leave your name, date and how your fishing went. P.S. The toilet paper is in the fridge.” The lake is well known in my area for its
speckled trout. For two years my neighbor Bobby and I had been planning a trip in to try our luck. I’m more of a hump-my-gear- through-the-woods kayak fisherman and Bobby is a tow-his-boat-to-the-lake motor fisherman, but our sense of adventure and our craving for speckles (not to mention his beer fridge) brought us together in his workshop to plan our first ATV kayak fish- ing adventure. Finally, on the last Saturday of trout
season we loaded two sit-on-tops onto the rack we built for Bobby’s Yamaha Rhino ATV. Finding our way to the lake turned out
to be as much fun as the fishing. With the help of a GPS and directions sketched on a Coors Light label we rolled up to the cabin around noon, Bobby bagging
two partridge on the way (we brought a shotgun in case the fish weren’t biting). It wasn’t long before we had the kayaks in 25 feet of water marking trout at 12 feet on the sonar. With the last two issues of Kayak Angler
we’ve received hundreds of letters from fishermen everywhere, more than a cou- ple complaining we’re too geared toward coastal fishing. One wrote, “Obviously this is a huge market for kayak fishing as it is right now but personally, coming from the Midwest, fishing inland lakes and rivers my whole life, it didn’t grab me. Redfish, strip- ers and snook do nothing for me. Gimme smallies, pike and walleyes.” It’s true the bulk of today’s kayak fish-
ermen are fishing coastal and inshore saltwater; however, the data from the American Sportfishing Association in- dicates that there are three times more freshwater anglers than saltwater anglers and they accumulate five times as many fishing days per year. I’m convinced that on raw participation numbers alone kayak fishing will be a freshwater phenomenon. And why else? Because of hard to
reach muskie rivers [see “Northern “Skies,” pg 29] and speckle lakes per-
fect for two fishing kayaks and guys like Bobby and me. Back at the lake, with four speckles for
dinner, Bobby loaded our gear into the Rhi- no and I wandered up to the log cabin. The cabin was a tidy two-room affair, furnished and decorated by no less than three gen- erations of men’s men. The liquor cabinet was a rusty and dented breadbox stocked with two uncracked bottles of Jack and a half six-pack of Bud. Old rods and broken crosscut saws hung on the walls. Tooth- picks stood at attention at the finish line on the cribbage board. With Meaghen, Miss June 2001, watch-
ing over me, I sat down at the pine table. I wondered how many years it would be be- fore paddles hang in the empty gun rack and kayaks lay overturned on the shore. In the notebook I wrote: “September 29, 2007. Scott and Bobby
were here. They were biting well; we kept four nice ones. I write for Kayak Angler magazine. Your lake is perfect for kayak fishing. You should try it.”
SCOTT MACGREGOR is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Kayak Angler. And in case you’re wondering, the toilet paper is kept in the fridge so the mice can’t get at it.
www.kayakanglermag.com… 7
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