00:00:04 Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. 00:00:06 Speaker 2: I'm your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lighting and just in general cuntry living. 00:00:12 Speaker 1: I want you to stay a. 00:00:13 Speaker 2: While as I share my experiences in life lessons. This country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stores to share. First the bear, then the bike. We're still in Saskatchewan and we've got a bear in the bag. Now it's time to fish. Join me at the fire. Let's get started. I've described Saskatchewan, Canada as one of my most favorite places on earth, and it's true. My first introduction was a decade ago with the mule Skinner himself, Clay Nucombe. I was up there following him around with a camera, long before either of us went to work for Meat Eater, him obviously being there longer than me. But the first trip there for me was important because it was the one that got me hooked. That was the infamous five and a half hour boat ride of Peril fifty five miles. 00:01:31 Speaker 1: I think that's like. 00:01:32 Speaker 2: Six million kilometers on a dog's lid. Just not sure what the exchange rate is to watercraft. Anyway, Clay and the boat he was in beat us to the bank by a few minutes, and when I got there, Clay Bolt was standing on the end of the dock, grinning like a baked possum. Offered me a hand out of the boat and on to terra firma. As I took his hand and stepped up beside him, I quoted my favorite line from Gordon Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. 00:02:00 Speaker 1: I'd had that. 00:02:01 Speaker 2: Song playing over and over in my head from the time we left the bank until mercifully coasting up to the dock where my h'll billy buddy was waiting to get my reaction to the start of our big adventure together. For anyone wondering, I did the math fifty times from start to finish. You can listen to the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald fifty times in five and a half hours. But as I stepped up beside him, I said, with the joy of still being alive, does anyone know where the love of God goes? When the waves turned the minutes to hours, they looked at me with the most astonished expression, said, did you just make that up? We saw a lot of bears on that trip, a lot of big ones too, and I got my first glimpse of the Northern lights. It never really got dark, but late one night we were outside by the fire and saw them. They looked more like a little wistful colored smoke than what I would eventually see almost a decade later. Regardless, when the bear tags were filled, we all started fishing, and that gave the cameraman the first opportunity to participate in the action rather than just observing it from behind the lens. We caught northern pike by the boat loads, mostly on yellow painted spoon with five red diamonds painted on one side like a playing card, towing a treble hook. I've had learned that the regard for that bait up there is second only to Gordon Lightfoot himself. Mister Lynn Thompson started churning out that iconic bait back in nineteen fifty one in Abernathy, Saskatchewan, and for the last seventy five years it's been handing out sword lips all over the continent. Gordon Lightfoot was thirteen when the first one rolled off the production line, and as of last count, they've made more than fifty five million. Gordon has sold ten million albums. Both are treasured Canadian originals worthy of their lofty status. But if spinning reel fishing for big pike was something to behold, I couldn't imagine what fly fishing for them would be. 00:04:21 Speaker 1: Now. 00:04:21 Speaker 2: That was back when I was getting into fly fishing, and with every turn of the handle on that spinning riel, I longed for it to be me stripping a big, single hooked streamer over an ambush point where a pike was waiting to smash it with a violent take. That opportunity came this month on the bear hunt with Dante Tobacco Pilot's Lodge that I talked about last week. You never you never know how these hunts will go. You're dependent on a lot of things that you have no control over, like the weather and the animals. But we've tried to prepare for each scenario. However it played out, bear hunting was priority to Numero Uno. If that turned out to be a struggle, then the secondary story to the project. 00:05:09 Speaker 1: Would be how tough the hunting was. 00:05:11 Speaker 2: With the primary remaining, me going from behind the camera to in front of him. Now, if we tagged a bear before the time came for us to leave, we'd use what was left to fill out the story and fish fly fish. We'd be targeting the big ones that patrolled the cold waters of the Fonderlack in Bays where they patrolled in a constant. 00:05:34 Speaker 1: Search for food. 00:05:36 Speaker 2: Before leaving on this trip, I googled Northern Pike in Saskatchewan. The area where I was going was in the first four destination areas to find them. I felt good about my chances of getting an opportunity if the bear hunting worked out. If you listened last week, you already know that on day three, I feel my bear tag. If you haven't listened yet, alert on day three, I may or may not have filled my bar tag. 00:06:05 Speaker 1: You'll just have to go and listen. 00:06:08 Speaker 2: But I talked at length to Dante, one of the owners of the Pilot's Lodge where we were staying, about fly fishing there and whether I needed to tie any flies, what sized fly rod I needed to bring with me, and he assured me that he had everything I needed. I was nervous about depending on someone I didn't know having the equipment I was used to using, but space was at a. 00:06:32 Speaker 1: Premium on the floatplane. 00:06:33 Speaker 2: Flying in and between my bag and bowcase and Dave Gardner's bag and camera equipment, we were having to count and divvy up the weight allotted between all our gear. Since fly fishing wasn't either of the top two priorities to capture with the camera, I deferred to Dante's judgment and didn't bring anything, and it was the right decision. It was late when we finally caught all the quits on the day I got my bear. The next morning we spent skinning the bear and getting the bear meat squared away, some of which we were going to have for supper that night. Then, when all the chores were done, we loaded up in the boats and headed up river to the same bay where I'd gotten my bear the evening before. There was a bald eagle nest on the cliff face about twenty feet above the water in a series of rapids, which we went by, and we could see two fuzzy little eaglets staring at us, says. We shot up the rapids in Dante's boat, pushed by his new jet foot out board The fly rod Dante had waiting on me was a nine foot ten weight, the same length that I was used to casting, but twice as heavy. If you're not familiar with what that means, checked this out. Fly rod weights range from one to fifteen plus and indicate the size of the fly line the rod is to cast. The rod and line must match for the rod to bend over or properly load. As they say, the higher number means it's stiffer and a heavy rod built for larger flies and fish. In Arkansas, when I'm troutfishing, I typically use a five. 00:08:17 Speaker 1: Weight rod, smaller number, smaller line than flies. 00:08:22 Speaker 2: Coincidentally, that's the same size fly rod I grew up fishing for brim with my dad, but a rod of that size could potentially get wrecked by the fish that inhabit the trophy class fishery in northern Saskatchewan. Dante asked me if I knew how to double haul when casting. I told him, in my mind I was a pro added but in reality I could possibly kill someone with my erratic and out of rhythm false casting. That looked more like I was sword fighting a swarm of yellow jackets, and he did fishing. I watched him and Nick Goff's another guy in Campton I told you about last week. They were standing at the end of the dock and I watched them send a pike fly the size of a small child effortlessly through the air with a minimum of effort and a maximum of accuracy using the double Hall method. 00:09:13 Speaker 1: Now there's a. 00:09:13 Speaker 2: Ton of how to videos on the University of YouTube, but I learned it while watching two childhood friends from Lloyd, Saskatchewan putting on a clinic at the dock beside what I like to call Fort Fondelot, our remote wilderness outmost. I was thinking about what I saw them doing when Dante killed the engine and we coasted into the middle of that bay, the same bay where the evening four we'd given a beautiful cinnamon colored BlackBerry. A ride back to the Fort, I was handed a hearty fly rod designed by the folks over in England who've been making them for the last one hundred and fifty years. It was the first one I'd ever held in my hand. It was awful, pretty to look at, and it had a match in reel with a turquoise colored fly line. I spooled out some line and started false casting and feeding the coils of line that had gathered at my feet. As the weight of the line forward and backward pushed that red and yellow fly further and further toward my target. The first cast landed surprisingly where it I had intended it to. I had initially been hopeful just to get it out of the boat and into the water reasonably close to where the fish were. I was more than proud of the results of my first attempt. I repeated the process, gaining confidence along with distance on each successive attempt. They didn't all look like what Dante and Nick had demonstrated, but a lot of them did. And with Dave filming and running his camera from next boat, less than a dozen cast in, I hooked something I've been instructed to strip set the hook, which is the counterintuitive to every other method of catching the fish I've ever been taught brim bass, crappy catfish, and trout. When you get a bite, you try to put them on the bank with a big upward pull, forcing the rod tip way above your head, and burying that hook in the fish well. With the strip set, it's just an extended version of stripping the bait to entice a bite for whatever you're fishing for. When pikes are the target, it usually doesn't take much coaxing to get them chunk. They're always hunting for something to eat. Nick explained it to me this way. The water may look calm and nice on the top, but beneath the surface it's the wild wild West twenty four to seven. It's full of predatory fish, and nothing is safe. I don't know how many took, but I had been fishing for less than fifteen minutes when I saw the pike hit the fly and swirl to leave. As I stripped, set the hook as hard as I could. 00:12:10 Speaker 1: I stripped it twice in a row and held a slack. 00:12:13 Speaker 2: Firm as I as I went to the rill and cranked in the loose line cold around my feet as fast as I could while maintaining pressure on what I thought was a pretty big fish. He made a couple of runs, peeling line off the riel as the drag sang out loud that whatever was on the other end of my line had no intention of giving up easy. Two or three runs later, I was holding a forty three inch version of est soox Lusius, the northern pike. Anything forty inches and above is considered a trophy class pike and estimated to be beyond fifteen years old. I had just landed one three inches beyond that mark, the first specimen of such on a fly rod. We got our photos and released her back into the cold water to rest, recover, and resume what she was built to do. The feeling of seeing that fish swim away unscathed after the fight was just as satisfying as landing it. Fished for a while longer, and as we worked our way back toward the river, I hung another one. My casting had improved and I was way more comfortable on the second hookup than I was on the first, and that was the biggest fish of the day and the longest fresh water fish of my life. A massive dinosaur of a pike that measured forty six inches be pretty hard to top that one. So we called it a day and made our way back to camp, filming different scenic things along the way. The next day we fished for walleye. In the span of less than i hour. We had more than enough to feed the five of us. The rest we caught that afternoon received a pass and we returned to the chilly depths of the river. Our trip was now nearing the end, and with our departure, Fort Foondelock would be boarded up and secured. A few months will pass before Dante and his crew returned to guide other folks on the quest for. 00:14:14 Speaker 1: Big fish and bull moose. 00:14:17 Speaker 2: But along the river between the camp buildings, the day to day activity will continue, just as it has for the last ten thousand years, following the retreat of the last glaciers that formed this wilderness mecca, a place that's been home to bear, moose and the Thenesoline people for just as long. I don't know when I'll get to physically return to Northern Canada, but since I've come home, catch myself going back whenever my mind gets idle or something subliminately reminds me of. 00:14:53 Speaker 1: It, and for a moment I can. 00:14:55 Speaker 2: Feel the air that has never been breathed before, the wildlife that no one has seen before, in a place with the oldest exposed bedrock on Earth, and for that moment, I'm right back there among the newest, oldest things. Thank you so much for letting me taking your fishing with me north of the border. Next week We're heading south of the border, the border of Arkansas. We'll be fishing for flathead catfish on the Washita River in Louisiana with my good friend Bradley Smith, the man behind the YouTube channel God's Country Hunting and Fishing. 00:15:37 Speaker 1: Well, I'm sure you've probably heard. 00:15:39 Speaker 2: I hope you have the bear grease overalls lost yesterday. 00:15:44 Speaker 1: If you fancy yourself a pair. 00:15:45 Speaker 2: You might want to get over to the Meat Eater dot com and get them order. Thank y'all so much for listening to all of us here on the Bear Grease channel that includes Clay bow the Professor and Yours Truth. 00:15:57 Speaker 1: Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. I don't know, y'a'll be careful.