Fishing

Our camp is located very close to south Henik lake so one of the favourite evening activities is fishing. The camp owns a small aluminum boat and motor and if the weather is nice a few people will float down the river after supper is over. A fish is guaranteed with every cast, and every fish is a lake trout.

Lake trout are indigenous  to North America and are found in most provinces and territories, with the exceptions of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island. However from a zoogeographical perspective, lake trout are quite rare.  In Canada, approximately 25% of the world's lake trout lakes are found in the province of Ontario, but even at that, only 1% of Ontario's lakes contain lake trout. The distribution of lake trout is largely due to glacial activity and the retreat of the Wisconsin ice sheet about 10,000 years ago (had to sneak in some geology somewhere). As this ice sheet melted and retreated northward, it sculpted the landscape, producing thousands of freshwater lakes, perfect for lake trout.

Lake trout inhabit deep, clear, rocky lakes and their native American name of Namaycush means dwellers of the deep. However they also inhabit shallow lakes and rivers in the northern part of their range; i.e.  Henik Lake. Lake trout avoid light, spawn at night and may migrate up to 300 km to their spawning grounds.

Lake trout are the biggest trouts in the world and the largest fish weighed 46.3 kg (102 lb). This huge fish was caught by the commercial fishery at Lake Athabasca, Saskatchewan in 1961 but the angling record is equally impressive. A lake trout caught in 1995 at Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories weighed 32.8 kg (72.25 lb).

Since so many fish are caught on the camp's fishing excursions we generally practice catch and release, but on two occasions we have brought trout back for supper. The first fish was caught by the camp cook, and although the camp did not have a scale at the time, it's weight was estimated at 11 kg (24.2 lb.). That fish fed seven of us, plus we had leftovers. The second two fish were brought back by a geologist and the helicopter pilot. One of these fish weighed 14 kg (30.9 lb.) and the second was a wee bit smaller. I hate to think what a 46.3 kg fish would look like, and how do you get a thing like that into your boat?

When the cook slit her fish open she found an entire fish backbone inside of it's stomach. Apparently this is normal; in big lakes the trout are piscivorous (a fancy word for fish eaters) but in smaller lakes they eat plants, small crustaceans and aquatic insects (aquatic insects???).

By the end of the summer I may be tired of lake trout but right now it is a tasty treat.