The Lake is Big outside the Reef!!

Here is the Video of our last week out on "The Lake"

Winter on Lake Manitoba


Perch fishing has been pretty good for the first couple of weeks. Hopefully it will continue for another month. Temperature has just begun to warm up too. So the ice crack should start to pile up like crazy. the ice has been "talking" since yesterday when the south wind started. Quite often you hear "Chunk" as the temperature rises. Today we could hear rumbling like thunder for sometimes 5 minutes on end as the crack pushes together until something gives and carries on for 30 or 40 miles, crushing together 3 to 4 feet of ice.

"The Lake is big outside the Reef" This is a saying that was written on an old wooden fish tub that is still over at the family farm. It means outside Long Point Reef which is 4 miles south of Einar's island which is 2 and a half miles out from Scotch Bay which is 1 and a half miles west of my house, the lake is BIG! Kind of an inside joke between my brother and myself. We do not know who wrote that but it is very true. There is nothing but smooth mud bottom out in the middle of Lake Manitoba, but that is where the Perch are. The lake is big outside the reef.

Minus 46 Degrees Celcius with the Wind Chill, Feels pretty good? Not really.
That is the Jigger under 3 feet of ice. It takes out the line to set our nets.
Fishing was so good, one day this week we ran out of tubs. So we just dumped them on the floor. It takes around 240 Perch per tub to fill. Lots of picking in a day.
We catch a few pretty big Perch too.

The video of our first days troubles on "The Lake"

Well, the first frostbite showed up today. Yesterday my brother Jamie said to me,"Hey your nose is frozen". I wanted a picture but by the time the camera was fished out of my snow suit it would have thawed, I did not feel like going out from the back side of the Bombardier to keep it frozen,LOL After showering today Rena noticed there was a patch of skin missing from the bridge of my nose, just a little frozen skin, nothing serious.

Here is the link to the video of our first day on "The Lake"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7liRe_AdfzI

Perch Season begins on Lake Manitoba with a Bang!!

Perch Season began today and it was a Stormy Day!! Very poor visibility, -20 celsius, and a wind gusting to 70km/h, and we had fishing to do!! My brother and I have the same work ethic, if there is a job to do, we will get it done no matter what the weather. Today we delivered once again, it was not pleasant out there but as long as you stayed moving it was not to bad. We did have a little trouble though. As we were crossing the first ice crack, (which was wider than we expected) one of the skis on our sled that we haul our snowmobile on caught the edge of ice on the crack as we came across. The end result....






A bent steel ski and a partially wrecked snow machine, could have been alot worse had the Bombardier hit the crack like that. We just took the snowmobile and left the sleigh. It was very cold driving the snow machine as we were going setting nets 15 miles from home. A long ways with no windshield to hide behind. Anyways I toughed it out and by late afternoon the wind was going down and it was actually almost enjoyable. The wind is supposed to blow from the north tomorrow and get colder. GREAT!! Can't wait to start catching fish..

Sportshows were a success!!!

Bookings were very good at the 2 sportshows I attended these past few weeks. A reminder to anyone wanting to book a flyin trip with us to call or email for dates as they are filling up fast.

I will show you those little gold Lake Perch soon, hopefully lots and lots of them.

Sportshow Time Again

Tomorrow I head down to Minneapolis for a couple of sportshows. The All Canada Show starts on Friday Jan 4th in Minneapolis at the Convention Center. It is held in the lower part of the Convention Center. Then on to the St.Paul for the Annual Sportsman's Show held at the Rivercenter. This one starts on Wednesday Jan 10th. Hope to see some of you down there.

Trophy Night in Eriksdale

We have 30 members in our little club with 9 entries in the Head competition. I did not have an entry this year but I did win it last year. The bucks are way bigger this year over all. 5 scored over 150 and the winner scored 165. Nice to see. Everyone is practicing trophy management and it is starting to show. No more small bucks being taken.

A nice Elk taken in our area with a bow by an old friend Jodie.

My Brother Jamie with his buck.

The only non-typical entry.



Tis was the winner. He scored 154 typical. Nice deer.

My office on Lake Manitoba

This is my brother Jamie as we are just getting started for the day, temperature was minus 25 Celsius. No wind so it was quite warm out there. I will take some pictures and video on the Stormy days for you to see what it is like out there when Mother Nature decides to blow.
The first Walleye of the day. Prices for fish are not great right now but this is a 3 or 4 dollar fish. In the store it would be worth 10 or 12 dollars. Fishing is similar to the beef industry in that someone in the middle is making a lot of money.

This is a Walleye and a Sucker when we take it out of the net....
and this is how we send it to market. We haul the fish to town and they are packed in a ice/water mixture called a Slurry and are shipped to Winnipeg every other day and distributed from there all over the world.

My uncle Jack stopped by the other day and helped us for awhile. Here is a nice 27 inch Walleye. If you buy Walleye in the store, check the thickness of the flakes of meat. I think they take these fish and make more than one fillet out of them and slice them in half to sell as a smaller fish.
Looking west across the lake. Beautiful day, no hat when you are out of the wind. Freeze your ears when you go out in the wind.lol

Until next time.....

Deer season is over. Commercial fishing starts on Lake Manitoba.

Winter took a while to get to us, as it did in all of Canada and the Northern U.S. but it came hard and fast. Two weeks ago there was no ice around, but all of a sudden it was Minus 20 Celsius every day and snowing. It has snowed over a foot so far. We have made over a foot of ice in two weeks. This is unusually fast but it is not rough so it is nice to travel on. I am Commercial fishing for Walleyes on Lake Manitoba now and will be getting some pictures on here soon about that. Keep an eye on the Youtube for some Commercial fishing videos as well for two different Walleye Filleting styles of my brother and myself. I will put the links up on here when I get them done.

Whitetail season is over and I did not see a big enough buck that I wanted to shoot. Passed up 3 or 4 nice ones in the 120-130 class but was waiting for THE ONE. I did take a doe late in the season for some meat but had a great season being out in the bush. The weather was fairly warm and you could sit in your stand a long time before you got cold. The bigger bucks started moving fairly late here and are still going after the season is all done. I don't mind, spread those genes boys,LOL. Good for the herd. There was some pretty big deer shot around my local area this fall with my brother having a good one taken a half mile from the farm where I grew up. We have a small group of guys who get together and show off their heads in a couple of weeks so I will have my trusty camera to take a few pics of some Interlake Bucks.

Now I have to wait another year to have this view again. Pulled my last stand on Sunday. It was -30 celsius on the morning of the last day. BRRR! I sat for only 45 minutes before I pulled the plug.

Here is my brother Jamie's Buck. 22 inch spread with 22 in main beams. Scored 151. Very nice deer.

Hockey
Hockey season is well under way up here and even the rinks with Natural ice are up an running. I am playing senior hockey still and loving it. This is regular hockey with hitting, fights, and the works. Sometimes it can be a gong show out there. It can get pretty crazy since the towns around here have been rivals forever in every sport. But our true passion is hockey and we take it very seriously. Well seriously enough that we do not like to lose.

I am also coaching two teams. I coach my youngest daughter Maija on a mixed boys and girls team and coach both Taina and Maija on an all girls PeeWee team who plays against boys teams all season but enter Provincials in the girls Division. That is a little different coaching an all girls team, a first for me. They are both winning this season which is nice to see as the girls had never won a game in their previous 4 years. I have a bunch of girls who have played hockey all their lives and it shows.

I played in Fisher River this past weekend and scored two goals in a 8 to 5 losing affair. It was 6 to 5 until late in the game.

Our problem as you can see from the picture below, is we only had 6 skaters!
We had 2 defenceman and 4 forwards. All the guys on my team work and it just happened that most guys were away up north of out west this weekend. I played at least 55 minutes of hockey on Sunday which is way too much when you are getting hit, hooked, and making hits. Can't fight when you have six skaters, although some idiot on the other team tried to goad one of our guys into a fight. One of our defenceman Jamie, who went to Green Bay with me never came off the ice for 60 minutes of hockey!!!! His brother Gordie who I played my minor hockey with was the other defenceman but he had 4 penalties so he had a rest a few times. We were down 4 to 0 after the first but it was 4 to 2 after the second and in the third we tied it up at one point but slowly ran out of gas. We did hit 2 goal posts in the las 5 minutes though, we could have won if the bounces went our way. Later in the season we would have been able to pull it out.