July Fly Fishing North/Central Manitoba
July has us doing a second (annual?) trip to Cranberry Portage Manitoba. Like last year, first stop is the Pine River, just north of Dauphin Manitoba.
I am pretty good with the bugs in the province, but it was a record year and I was ill prepared. One, no amount of bug spray or pipe smoking stopped the onslaught and two, the road was in too rough a shape to hazard bottoming out the SUV again!
Next year I am definitely bring a bug net to wear and possibly renting a more robust vehicle!
Barbe Lake Manitoba
The next day we only ventured to the 1st crossing on the Pine. it has been good in some years but the last 2 no fish to even scare.
the next day we made our way up to Cranberry Portage and our first day fishing was good old Barbe Lake.
Webster Lake Manitoba
The next day I went and got skunked at Webster Lake I actually got one small fish near the end the lake was quite weedy and hard to fish The other guys went to Amphipod Lake and did quite well actually.
Amphipod Lake
At the insistence of the other guys in the party, I went to Amphipod Lake. The always generous Stu lent me his float tube because my fish cat is just too much boat to try and drag into a portage so that’s what we did and I had a great day and got a bunch of really big fish here are the video and photos.
Language Warning
Sorry, but the first two fish got off way too easily and a little frustrating so I admit to possibly swearing.
Webster Lake Manitoba
A lovely lake that reportedly was stocked with a rainbow trout and has fished fairly well but by the time I got to it was very very weedy had a large populations of loons working the shallows. I got like one small trout kind of in the middle of the day
Beautiful lake probably better there to get earlier in the season or maybe not in the middle of a heat wave.
Scotty Lake
Another gem of a lake in the middle of all this beauty. Again, another lake that was supposedly stocked with two or three kinds of trout. All we managed was perch but being far away from everything it was actually quite nice there.
Dauphin Manitoba
Since the Pine River was such a bust we decided to fish the Vermilion River. It’s a shorter drive easier on the car.
Nice catching some chunky small mouth bass in a river .
Halfway through it I did switch over to my fishing partner’s Stephen Jay 7wt bamboo, that was made by Marcel Duval, and caught a few fish that way.
Summary
This will be the second time going up north and stopping off in Dauphin to go up to Cranberry Portage and hit some of those lakes up there. Overall it wasn’t as good I got skunked on some of the trout lakes, Goose was unfishable Pine was a disaster. I definitely going to be prepared for bugs next time but it was nice to finish off with Vermilion and some bass
Some big fish were caught and some lessons learned.