Fly Fishing
Not experienced with Fly Fishing for Walleye and Northern Pike, our guides can help you.
Don’t have the right equipment to Fly Fish for Walleye and Northern Pike, we have high quality Fly Fishing rentals as well as the right flies, streamers and other Fly Lures.
Always wanted to learn Fly Fishing? Northern Pike is a fun way and satisfying way to start and Walleye Fly Fishing is not hard to learn either.
Pike Fly Fishing
Fly Fishing for Pike on Wabatongushi, (or anywhere for that matter) is exhilarating! Most of my time targeting Pike is spent either early morning or in the evening. Weed beds, muddy bays and rock structure are the preferred haunts. Pike set ups should be 8-10wt rods coupled with a reel that has a large capacity spool as large Pike are not shy about running well into the backing. A reel with a decent drag system is a must! I typically have a floating line rigged up with a full sink spool at the ready. I simply run 5-6′, 25lb Fluorocarbon as a leader.
Although that set up works well for me, I do lose flies occasionally. Some folks preferer knotless wire leader.
I’ll admit that most of my pike fishing these days is done with big foam poppers, deer and elk stacked mice and other top water fly’s. There not much that beats watching Pike erupt full speed out of the water in a attempt to annihilate your fly!
Other selections would be Pike Slayers, Bunny Leeches, and just about any large streamers.
Bigger is almost always better!
Walleye Fly Fishing
Ok, we’ll admit Walleye are not typically the species that come to mind when it comes to fly angling one of Ontario’s many pristine remote lakes. The lack of interest within the fly-fishing community has puzzled us for quite some time as Walleye fight like bulldogs, are eager to hammer a variety of flies and require nothing more than the typical 5-8wt set up.
Try to imagine the perfect lake to fly fish Walleye all season long. A slightly tannin-stained water column is preferred to help reduce light penetration, in turn encouraging Walleye to feed longer into the morning and get back on the bite earlier in the afternoon/evening.
Next, we suspect an average water depth of just 10-15 feet keep Walleye well within the presentation window of floating lines and light slow sinks. Couple that with a plethora of structure. All kinds of structure! Islands, sholes, rock piles, saddles, mud flats, steep transitions and copious amounts of prime weed beds. Lake Wabatongushi was carved out of the Canadian shield with fly fishing for Walleye in mind with the best conditions imaginable for Walleye fly -fishing habitat.
My Walleye set up (as mentioned earlier) is simple. Very simple. I typically use a 6wt rod, full sink/floating line with a fairly stout length of fluorocarbon on the business end.
Techniques for Pike
Techniques for northern pike fly fishing depend on how northern pike are feeding. Spring northern pike are feeding heavily and will take smaller 6-inch streamers. Try various retrieval depths, strip speeds and actions until something works. Try casting your fly, let it sink for a few seconds then retrieve the line in short, snappy 4-inch strips every second or two. Lively up and down action seems to work well in spring. Brass or other dumbbell eyes add action to large pike streamers. Northern pike in summer tend to be a bit lazier and pick on larger food, larger fish, ducklings, small animals. Surface or floating flies can be a lot of fun in summer. As we get into late summer, northern pike hunt a little deeper but still prefer larger prey, so extremely large streamers that you can present 6 – 10 feet down seem to work better and sometimes slower, steadier retrieves. Northern pike do not seem to be significantly particular about flies matching bait colors closely and some of the best northern pike flies are very brightly coloured. Remember, northern pike are killers first, eaters second. Eyes on flies seem to be very effective for northern pike.