A visit to Long Lake Adventures

This past weekend fellow kayak anglers Craig and John took a trip up to Long Lake Adventures, just outside of Plaster Rock, NB.   What a great place!   Long Lake adventures is a hunting and fishing paradise offering world class fishing for lake trout and land locked salmon.     Here is video describing the weekend followed by some pictures and a more in depth recap.

After making the nearly 5 hour drive, we hit a small snag blowing a tire just before we arrived at the cabins.   Thats what I get for being short on patience and driving a little too fast on the logging roads!  Between the three of us, it only delayed us a few minutes.

Finally we arrived, met Clay and got unpacked.    Clay put us up in one of the great cabins on site which had electricty, a gas stove, fridge, radio, and beds for 4.    There was also a seperate building housing bathrooms for both men and women with showers.    What more can you ask for?   Oh, each cabin also had a bbq set up as well, alongside a firepit.   What more could you ask for out of a cabin out in the deep NB wilderness!

Well, on to what we came for, the fishing!   The wind ended up being much stronger throughout the weekend than we had hoped for, which can make kayaking trecherous on a big body of water like Long Lake. However we came prepared with Craig and I riding out Old Town Predator MX's along with John in his homemade Fundy Tiger Shark.

On Satuday, I hooked into and landed a 20" land locked Salmon in just about an hour.   That was a great start!  However I ran into problems with the Rapala lure.   The O Ring to the hook in the fish split open as I removed it, so I went back to a nearby beach to move the front hook back to the rear.

With minor surgery complete on the lure, I headed back out... Wouldn't you know it I get another hit!   This one started spooling the reel, I could tell it was a much bigger fish.... and then it was gone as quick as that.    I reeled in to check the line and found the last hook again missing!     The second ORing split open....  Dammit Rapala!!!!

Back to the beach.  This time I took a hook and O-Ring off a Lymans Lure, noticably much higher quality as I know that Lymans uses Owner Hooks for thier materials.    I was not taking any more chances with the built in Rapala hardware... even removing the lead O Ring from the front of the lure and tieing instead a Rapala knot.


Unfortunately, there no more hits for me on the day.    John however did have some great luck as I found out later in the evening.   Never one to be out-fished, he landed an 18" and then a 23" land locked salmon on the day.   Craig also had a hit, but was unable to land his.

We wrapped up after a little over 5 hours on the water of near constant paddling and relaxed for the evening in hopes of doing better on Sunday.   We met some other kayakers, chatted to a few of the other groups who were there to fish in their boats and chatted with these guys who bottomed fish out in the middle of the pond for lakers.    We didn't realized what strategy was needed to target lakers but now that we know, we hope to be back to try this out ourselves!    Imagine catching these monsters in kayak!!!

Sunday brought even higher winds and rain in the morning.  It didn't bode well.   But Craig, John, and I tried it just the same.   With the winds on our backs the paddle out was great, we flew!   But once it was time to come back, things got very tough.    I had to paddle hard for 2 hours straight to go about 1 km, stopping for a moment meant the wind would blow me back immeadiatly.   Fishing in those conditions is no fun at all!    At least my new Cabela's jacket and bibs kept me warm and dry!

We will absolutely plan to visit Clay and Tanya at Long Lake again, hopefully on a weekend where the wind is much more reasonable.   I want to catch that land locked salmon that got away and add a laker to it!