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The kids and I are on a two week summer vacation in Michigan at my parents house right now.  As part of our vacation this year, my parents and I decided that we would take the kids fishing at a family owned island cabin in Gogama, Ontario, Canada for a few days.  I used to make the trip up to the rock at least once a year when I was growing up but this was my first trip in eleven years.

We arrived in Gogama later in the evening on Wednesday the 4th.  The island is 7 miles from the lodge that stores our boats for us and as you can imagine, there isn't much on the island so we have to pack everything in.  After about an hour of loading the boats we were off.  Another hour of hauling everything up the hill to the cabin and we were settled in for three days of fishing.

We fished for three days, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and then packed out on Sunday.  The typically daily fishing schedule consisted of a couple of hours in the morning followed by breakfast.  Then a couple of hours of mid day fishing followed by dinner and then a couple of hours of evening fishing followed by fish cleaning and cocktails.

The weather was all over the map.  The warmest day was around 85 with clear sky's and sunshine.  The coldest day was around 55 for a high with clouds, rain and wind.  The coolest night time temperature dipped to 40 or so.  Overall though the weather was not too bad.

The main species of fish that we fish for up there are Walleye because Canadian Walleye are some of the best table fair you will ever eat.  The lake also has some great Northern Pike fishing and they have been stocking Smallmouth bass for at least the last 10 years so the smallie fishing is getting to be pretty good.

One morning my oldest son and I went looking for some big Northerns with some topwater lures just for fun.  We ended up catching a dozen or so decent fish up to 30 inches but we never could find the big 40 inch plus fish we were looking for.  Here's a picture of a buzzbait fish.

Another morning I took my oldest two kids and we went after some smallies we had found the night before while trolling for some Walleyes.  We got on a school of fish that ranged from a pound to maybe 3 pounds and had a blast.  I would cast out a jerkbait and hook a fish and reel it in slow.  When the fish got to the boat there was always a half dozen more with him so the kids would through their grubs in the water and hook two more.  The action went on like that for about and hour and a half before they decided they'd had enough.  Here's a couple smallie pics.

The remainder of our outings we focused our attention towards catching dinner and filling the freezer.  Most of the Walleye we caught were perfect eating size in the 15" to 18" range with few bigger fish up to 24".  Numbers were definitely not a problem as we probably averaged 40 fish a day between the two boats maybe more.  The hot bait for the walleye for the week was a school bus yellow jig head with a school bus yellow mister twister grub sweetened up a little with a piece of Canadian night crawler.  Here's a few Walleye pics to complete the story.