Written by Phil Monahan
Photos by: Sandy Hays
We had worked our way almost completely around the shoreline of the small lake with just a few hammersticks and I was beginning to wonder if there were any big pike at all under the dark water. I’d thrown every pattern I could think of – including my beloved Pat Cohen’s Mallard Duckling – so our guide, Jeff Blum, had given me a behemoth of fur and feathers that looked like a wet sock being thrown. After about a dozen casts, I didn’t have confidence that this fly would do any better than the others, so I took it back to the boat and turned to ask Jeff if he had any better ideas. His eyes were saucer-like, staring past me into the water, and as I looked down at my fly bobbing just beside the boat, a huge pair of toothed jaws closed around it. I hooked it and after a short but powerful fight we had the 34 inch pike in the net. Mission accomplished.
Gateway to the Wild
Most Americans—steady in their sense of superiority over their nice but perhaps a bit boring neighbors to the north—probably have no idea how vast Canada’s wilderness is. Canada is just 35 million square miles larger than the US a ninth the population. This leaves plenty of open land for anglers, hunters, hikers and the like to play. And not all wilderness is polar bear and Inuit territory. In fact, part of this amazing, unspoilt country lies just across the border. And so, just four kilometers down a dirt road off the Trans-Canada Highway, we discovered true solitude, wild country and incredible warm-water fly fishing.
My friend Ted Putnam has been trying to persuade me to visit his lodge in western Ontario for several years, promising incredible fishing for smallmouth bass, pike and maybe even walleye if the conditions are right. My schedule never quite worked out, and to be honest I wasn’t entirely sure Hawk Lake Lodge was my cup of tea. After working as a guide in Alaska for three summers in the mid-1990s, I might have had a slightly snobby idea of what constituted “wilderness” and figured if I went to Canada I might as well be in the high ones go north. But Ted is absolutely tenacious, and after Hawk Lake won the 2019 Orvis-Endorsed International Lodge of the Year award, I was convinced. So in June I headed north with my fishing buddy and photographer Sandy Hays. What we discovered opened my eyes to incredible opportunities that are much closer to home than I imagined.
We landed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, at 2 p.m., packed our gear into a rental car, and made the three-and-a-half-hour drive east into Ontario — past the vast Lake of the Woods — to an inconspicuous turnoff 45 miles east of Kenora, which led us to the end of a wooded peninsula jutting south into Hawk Lake. We arrived in time for the pre-dinner happy hour and I took the opportunity to glance at the large menu hanging on the wall. A vast lake complex stretches south and east from the lodge with no civilization or roads for more than 60 miles. The US border is also just 86 miles south. Ted explained that the lodge has access to around 19 different lakes; All are public but Hawk Lake Lodge has the exclusive right to keep boats on them.
Jonesing for bass
The next morning we jumped in a boat with our wonderfully named guide, Jones Lebeau, and took a fifteen minute ride to the other end of Hawk Lake. We tied up, packed all the gear on our backs, and hiked twenty minutes through the forest to Wolf Lake, where another boat was waiting. Wolf Lake is a six-mile stretch of thin body of water with rocky shores and inlets, some sandy plains, and lots of fallen trees along the edges. We had the entire lake to ourselves.
Within five minutes a speck of green smashed my hard bodied popper over a rocky plain and we got our first glimpse of an Ontario smallmouth – a beautiful fish around 16 inches, with beautiful markings and a deep body. Although catching a fish that quickly seemed like a harbinger of quick action, it quickly became clear that a topwater pattern wasn’t the way to go. When I tied up a small Clouser Minnow with a white belly and a distinctive green wing, Jones said, “There’s a nice fish” and pointed to a dark shape swimming over a sandy bottom in about a meter of water. I threw my streamer ten feet forward and a meter beyond the cruiser and began to breathe life into the fly with an erratic scraping motion.
As soon as the fly moved, the perch would dart forward and start following the fly. After giving two sharp strips and then letting the clouser stall, the fish opened its gills and inhaled the fly. The whole experience was visually exciting – like tropical bony fishing – and the blackmouth turned out to be around 18 inches long and quite strong.
The same Clouser pattern combined with an erratic retrieve produced fish all day. We soon found that there were fish in the fallen logs along the shoreline and a cast next to a fallen tree usually resulted in a hook within a few scrapes. There were also small animals that stayed in rock gardens and in submerged places. We lost a few flies to branches and one to a pike that cut the leader cleanly.
All in all we ran between 25 and 30 basses, averaging about 16 inches, with four or five 17s and 18s. Dinks were very few, and the trophy of the day was a dark, chunky 19-incher that was caught from a deep pocket at the back of a small cove where two fallen logs came together in a V. For a couple of New England boys, it was a warm-water day like we’d never experienced before, on a remote wilderness lake that was all ours.
The mouse that roared
The next day, we took a trip with guide Jeff Blum to Paddy Lake, which is a 10-minute boat ride east of the dock. One of the cool things we discovered about the lakes Hawk Lake Lodge fishes is that each has their own unique character. While Wolf Lake has many shallow bays, reefs, and flooded spots, Paddy Lake is rockier and has some very steep drop-offs near the shore.
The day went very much like the previous one. On my very first cast I caught a Bronzeback using a tried and true diving pattern I’ve had for years. The beetle had barely landed in the water when a fish smashed it. But again, the surface patterns worked early and then became less effective as the sun rose higher. We switched to spearfishing with Sandy catching fish in various baitfish patterns while I did well with a crab colored wiggle bug that dived and flapped with every stripe.
After a waterfront lunch of walleye and potatoes roasted over an open fire, we decided to try Cliff Lake, which is connected to Hawk Lake by a short canal that runs under the road. At this point, Sandy decided to tether a mouse pattern, which he does everywhere we travel together. Jeff was a bit skeptical until the first bass smashed the deer hair mouse coming through weeds. Sandy moused several more and finally landed with the largest black mouth of the day just before we had to return to the lodge.
After our exciting experience with big pike at Shannon Lake on the morning of our third day we decided to return to Cliff Lake to see if the bass were still ready to eat mouse flies. The answer was resounding YES! Sandy and I cast different mouse patterns for about three hours and caught maybe a dozen fat blackmouths – and we missed about the same number. Most fish would pound the mouse pattern with a wild splash, but the really big bronzebacks would simply breathe in the big staghair flies, barely making a wave. The fly would just disappear and the rod would double bend in a flash.
One of the great things about fly fishing trips is that new destinations have the power to surprise and delight, even when you least expect it. It has been a very long time since I last fished for smallmouth bass and my love for this great game fish was rekindled on this string of lakes that made me feel completely removed from civilisation. Knowing that such wild and prolific fishing lies just a few hours’ drive from the US border has prompted me to spend more time looking at maps of southern Canada to see what other gems I might have found in the past flew over.
Phil Monahan is the editor of the Orvis Fly Fishing blog. For more information on Hawk Lake Lodge go to Click here. This story first appeared in Gray’s sports journal. See more destinations available through Orvis Travel Click here.
Since Sandy took so many great photos on our trip, I couldn’t resist sharing a few more fish shots with us:
