Monday, August 06, 2018

Today was all set to be the best fishing day of the trip. Slightly overcast skies, light wind, and perfect temperatures. We fished hard, all day. We caught exactly zero fish that we could keep. The biggest pike was around 14" and the biggest bass was about 9". So, what do you do when the fish just aren't biting? You head to a burned area of Gaskin, check out a campsite that pretty much no longer exists, and find the biggest blueberry patch you've ever seen.

Seriously, we could have picked blueberries the rest of the day. It's a good thing too, because when you pack your food based on having fish to eat, the extra calories from blueberries at least helps to offset the stomach rumblings a little bit.

It was early in the trip, so to get around not having fish, we decided we would eat our chicken packets with dinner instead of saving them for Wednesday as we had planned. We would just catch fish on Wednesday and swap that in to make up for it. It was a plan we had executed just fine in the past, and we were confident in making that decision.

The highlight of the day was a short bushwack excursion out of the southwest end of Gaskin (near the burned campsite) and over to Larsen Lake. Due to finding no area to land the canoes, and what seemed to be a tough up and over hill climb, we brought the fishing gear along but not the canoes. I discussed this short bushwack in another post here on BWCA.com, but here is the summary, originally posted in a thread titled "Larsen Lake" on 8/10/2018.

"We just got home today. Fishing took a sharp dive downward with the rain on Sat/Sun and Gaskin just didn’t cooperate while we were there other than 14-16” Pike. We did however make it to Larsen on foot, and took a few pictures.

I wish we would have brought the canoe, as it was only 200 yards the route we found after reaching Larsen to get back to Gaskin.. We went the hard way to reach Larsen (canoe would not have made the hard way), but the much easier way on the way back along a well established game trail would have worked. We did bring our rods, and fished for about 15-20 minutes with no luck. The mucky and brushy shoreline isn’t real conducive to shoreline fishing, and after a few snags, we gave up. My guess is that the lake holds fish, but with the dark stained water and no canoe, it’s only a guess how deep the lake actually is and what might be there. It was a fun bushwhack though, glad we were able to pull it off fairly easily with a compass and a little help from the game trail.

Here are a couple of pictures from the northern-most bay on Larsen. First picture is looking to the WSW towards the main body of the lake while standing in the middle of that bay. Second picture is looking more directly SW towards the bay on the south side of the lake. The rocks out a bit from shore in that picture are where we were able to stand for a while to fish. There is a small set of cliffs towards the eastern corner, behind where the pictures were taken, that give a nice view of the eastern end of the lake."