The first weekend of February 2004 and has it been cold! I mean, I have been fishing in Northern Ontario all my life and this has been one cold winter so far. On this trip we are north of Thessalon, Ontario, ready to fish for Lake trout and Whitefish on the very scenic Cummings Lake, right off Ontario Highway 129. I am accompanied on this adventure by Derek “Kippy” Patterson, Sales and Marketing Manager for MyFishingStore.com, and we are looking forward to some action. This is the first time we have fished this lake and we are told the Lake trout fishing is great!

We arrived at our accommodations for the weekend, The Tunnel Lake Motel and Trading Post, on Highway 129, just a few kilometers south of Cummings Lake. Tunnel Lake Motel and Trading Post offers good accommodations at a good price and are open all year round. The trading post and store offers most everything you might need or forgot to bring with you. They have bait, an impressive assortment of fishing tackle, and a lot of quality souvenirs of Northern Ontario Outdoors!

You may wonder why we fished Cummings Lake and not Tunnel Lake? You see, Tunnel Lake is a man-made lake with a hydro dam on it. They actually flooded an entire town area and the story goes that they left many of the town’s buildings and even the train tracks and the train itself, at the bottom of this newly formed lake. This was reportedly done decades ago and may be nothing more than an “old wive’s tale”, but it certainly adds character to the area. As for not ice fishing this lake, the hydro dam causes dramatic changes in the level of the water under the ice, making ice conditions for the most part, unsafe.

Saturday we got out on the lake and it was COLD! We were looking at -26 degrees Celsius with a bitter wind coming out of the northeast. The day was sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky, but damn it was cold! We got smart and set up on the sunny side of an empty ice fishing hut, perfectly situated between us and the frigid wind. We set up our lines after drilling through about two feet of ice (isn’t it great to be an Ice Fisherman!). We baited our rods with live minnows, Emerald Shiners for the Whitefish and large Sucker minnows for the Lake trout. Along with the live bait, we tied on some “attractors”, these are fishing spoons, like the Williams Wobbler, Toronto Spoons, and Tasmanian Devil lures, rigged up the line from the bait, with the hooks removed and designed to flash and help attract the fish.

We then set up the Eagle portable fish finder, and hoped to mark some fish. The fish finder lit up like a Christmas tree!. We marked fish from just below the ice to bottom, a distance of about 55 feet. We frantically worked our lures, but to no avail. After awhile the fish finder got very quiet, so we decided to talk to the other dozen or so other “hard water” anglers on the lake. These hearty folk did not have the benefit of a hut or even a wind break, and looked as cold as we felt. They, like us, were having no luck fishing and had been there before we got there. It did not look good. Being a beautiful sunny day is one thing, but many ice anglers agree, that it does not help the fishing. That was good enough reason for us, and although we fished the rest of this sunny day, we had no luck.

We returned to the motel at sundown, started preparing a great meal (good thing we brought food with us!), and settled in for the night, looking forward to starting out early the next day to fish the next lake on our list, but you will have to read the next My Fishing News article at MyFishingStore.com. to find out where that is!

Remember to practice safe and friendly fishing,

Kraig Edwards
Fishing Northern Ontario