It’s not often that you push your body to its physical limits when fishing.
If anything, a prolonged pursuit of fish leads to a few extra pounds around the midsection. This was definitely not the case as myself and two friends decided to bike to and then fish Cantlie Lake.
Most trips to Cantlie Lake involve some form of piston-power. An ATV or snowmobile one way along the hilly, bumpy 16-kilometre trail from Grey Mountain Road is adventure enough. Attempt it by mountain bike, loaded to the gills, and you’ve got a challenging day ahead of you.
Our party of three consisted of Eric the mountain biker, Michael the geo-cacher and myself the angler.
The first leg of the journey involved a great deal of mountain biking. Thankfully, as a former mountain biker, my bike of old was still up for the task. We hit some gnarly single track built for those who had technical in mind. With a couple of rest and photo breaks along the way, the trail took about two hours to conquer.
The next matter at hand was finding one of the old loaner canoes sitting somewhere along the Cantlie Lake beach. The angler in me could not wait to get onto the water and start fishing for the lake’s bounty of Arctic Charr. Unfortunately, fishing was not the priority as it was time to take a back seat to my geo-caching friend.
After finding the old canoe, we set the GPS to the correct coordinates and paddled our way across the lake. We were now on shore and within 60 feet of the hidden geo-cache.
A geo-cache is a little treasure that someone has hidden and provided the coordinates. Once again, we spread out and searched until we found the well-hidden black Rubbermaid container.
With two of the three motives out of the way, it was time for wholehearted fishing. My two friends were the designated paddlers as I focused on the small green lure at the end of my line.
I let out about 30 feet of line as we cruised shoals in eight to 15 feet of water. After a few minutes of paddling, we hooked into a spectacular, fresh, fighting, two-pound Arctic Charr. We continued the same pattern for a few hours and landed a few more fish.
After taking a nice, long break, it was time to hit the trail again. I tried not to remember all the downhill sections on the way down, because I was due to hit them again going the other direction. It was an incredibly painful ride with fatigue setting in and the direction going up, up, up, down, and up.
While it was incredibly rewarding to have biked 32 kilometres and accomplished so much in the day, I spent the whole ride cursing, knowing that I had added a few more pounds of fish in my pack.
