![]() ![]() On our final day, our cameramen finally got a well-earned opportunity to fish and they caught more than 20 toothy water wolves up to 44 inches before they had to change the fly. I’m not going to pretend that the pike on that huge inland sea were overly selective-we could have caught pike on a variety of flies, but these were the easiest to cast and surprisingly durable. You can fish them suspended near the surface, or drop them deeper using sinking lines to find pike lurking in the deeper cabbage.Īt all depths, the Athabasca northern pike ate them up. These Crossover Toads have a large profile, yet they are light and easy to cast. Though I liked the swimming qualities of Toads with rabbit collars and tails, bunny fur would be unnecessarily heavy for the 10-inch fly I’d need for trophy Canadian pike, so I used long EP Fibers-the same material used for the body-to make pike flies in the traditionally successful pike colors of red-and-black and red-and-white. I learned from a previous Fly Fisherman article that big Canadian pike liked huge flies, so I set to tying some giant Toad patterns for Lake Athabasca. When Conway Bowman’s invited guest canceled at the last minute, it was my duty as the show producer to fill in as his fly-fishing sidekick. In the summer of 2012, we had plans to film a couple of episodes of Fly Fishing the World on Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan. Like tarpon, their eyes are located near the tops of their heads, and they prefer to ambush suspended flies that are either at eye level or above them. No matter, it wasn’t long before I hooked another one and landed it after a full 10-round brawl.īig Canadian pike prefer large-profile flies. After multiple jumps and several blistering runs, I failed to bow to the fish on its final leap. Another Toad, and soon, another hooked tarpon. Then they wrestled the tarpon for a quick photo, and it was my turn to redeem myself. It wasn’t long before he was tight to a fish and we were beginning to think that we had finally cracked the code.ĭoug battled the 60-pound tarpon while Ian rigged me up with another shooting head, this time with a worthy set of knots. ![]() With that, I handed Doug Brady, my fishing partner and owner of Fly Treks, another Toad and he took the bow of the boat. I reeled up my line, now missing the shooting head and one of the only seemingly useful flies I had in my box. I quickly learned that the loop-to-loop connection that I had rigged the evening before, a few Belikins deep, had a significant weakness. Renowned guide Ian Cuevas knew better, and instructed me to prepare for all hell to break loose, which it did. The line went tight halfway through the retrieve, I set the hook hard into an immovable mass, and waited, not yet sure if I had found bottom or finally enticed one of these finicky fish to open its mouth. I tied on a black-and-white bunny Toad and cast it among a pod of porpoising tarpon. As it turned out, these Belize tarpon would be the first to get a sniff of my bunny Toads. Prior to the trip, with springtime pike on the brain, I’d been experimenting with Toad patterns tied entirely out of rabbit fur, and I was dying to fish them, but the winter weather had lingered in western Montana, and the only way to catch a pike was still through the ice. It was time to experiment, and I just happened to have some experimental flies that needed a trial run. We’d covered the water column with floating, intermediate, and fast-sinking lines. For two hours we’d been casting at poons and had been through all of the local go-to patterns in our boxes several colors of Cockroaches, Black Deaths, Deceivers, Clousers, even the dreaded Gummy Minnow, with nary a sniff. In a Belizean lagoon full of rolling tarpon, Doug, Ian, and I were perplexed. Affiliate Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. ![]()
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