 |
||||||||||||
 |
World Class Fishing, Food and Lodging | |||||||||||
| BY BRUCE LEESON | ||||||||||||
|
As one waits eagerly for the months to pass after booking a fly-in fishing trip, the imagination quickly sets into high gear and you soon imagine yourself catching trophies on every cast. On many trips reality sets in quickly as fishing, food and lodging do not live up to the images your mind has conjured up. This is not the case, I am pleased to report, at Kesagami Wilderness Lodge. Kesagami Wilderness Lodge offers second to none, world class trophy northern-pike fishing, along with enough walleyes to wear your arms out. Throw in lodging that is so comfortable that it can be a problem because you won’t want to get out of bed in the morning, food that is just incredible, and you have one of the best Fly-in trips available anywhere! Kesagami Wilderness Lodge is located 95 miles north-east of Cochrane, Ontario, or approximately 65 miles south-east of Moosonee, Ontario. Dependable Beaver float planes make the flight from the base camp in Cochrane to the lodge in about one hour. From Toronto, Cochrane is only eight hours highway drive, all on excellent roads. Other alternatives would be to fly into Timmins, Ontario and then bus to Cochrane to the base camp that has bunk house facilities for you to spend a night before your flight to the lodge, if needed. Kesagami Wilderness Lodge, was founded in 1983 by Jerry and Verena Krahenbuhl, when they bought out a small Indian outfitter with six cabins. Almost three years later, after flying in over 500 flights of material at a cost of over $1 million dollars, the lodge was ready for business. The new owners of Kesagami Wilderness Lodge, Bob Mattson and Marsha Gibbs, who hail from Naples, Florida, have already made some really exciting changes to the lodge since taking over, and have many more in store that will continue to keep the Lodge`s world class reputation intact. I will get into the legendary fishing at Kesagami in detail later but I first want to let you know why 90 percent of the customers that frequent this wilderness experience are repeat customers. The reason is simply that the food, hospitality and service are marvellous. The staff were fantastic, all that was needed was a mere mention of a need and you could count on it being done immediately. Boats were always ready and fuelled, the crew were eagerly waiting for your return from fishing to assist in docking the 23 foot custom made boats. Everything was extremely organized and ran smoothly to ensure that the patrons enjoyed their stay at the lodge. Now I surely do enjoy a good meal after a day`s fishing, as I know everyone does, and I guarantee that you will not go hungry at Kesagami. For anyone that has been to the Lodge in the past, you will find it hard to believe that anyone could improve on the food that you had enjoyed in the past. Well just read on because Michelbob`s Rib Restaurants, the new owners of the lodge, are going to blow you away with the menu that they have planned for this year. |
Bob and Marsha, while eagerly looking forward to running the lodge this year, are certainly not new to service and hospitality industry. Bob and Marsha run two extremely successful rib restaurants that are known nationwide as one of the finest rib & chicken eateries anywhere. Michelbob`s restaurant have won almost every barbecue rib cook-off and barbecue sauce title available. Some of these titles include: - World`s Best Sauce 1993, Richmond, VA. - Canadian National Rib Champions 1993, London, Ont. - 1992 U.S.A. National Rib Tour Champions - Grand Slam for Barbecue Sauce, which includes first place in Canada, United States and the World Championship Rib Fests I highly recommend that anyone travelling to the south western part of Florida be sure to drop in on one of the two Michelbob’s restaurants located in Naples, and Marco Island. Since opening the flagship location in Naples, Michelbob’s has served over 2,000,000 lbs. of baby back ribs imported from Denmark. The prize winning sauce is used at a rate of over 300 gallons a week, and each year Michelbob’s serves over 40,000 chickens. I personally consumed 2 lbs. of those ribs last year and believe me, they do live up to the billing. Let’s get to the fishing! Pike and walleye are what you are going to catch at Kesagami, and plenty of them. Our three day trip this past June saw us experience northern pike fishing that was truly the best that either my father Dennis or I have ever experienced. While at Kesagami we both caught and released our largest northerns ever. Walleye fishing was a shear joy with the numbers available, it was nothing to go out after dinner for the late bite and catch 50 to 100 walleye in three hours. Kesagami Wilderness Lodge is situated inside Kesagami Provincial Park and is the only facility on the entire lake. The Provincial Park was created nine years ago by the Ministry of Natural Resources. Being the only lodge on the lake, and being accessible only by air, you will not see anyone else fishing this body of water unless they are staying at the lodge. The lake is approximately 20 miles long, eight miles wide, and has an average depth of only 7 feet. It has numerous shallow, weed filled bays that make excellent northern pike breeding and feeding grounds. Fishing success becomes a matter of locating bays with weedbeds that are holding fish. Monster Northern Pike: Location During our trip in early June we found very little new green weed-growth. Because of the lake's northerly location, ice out does not usually occur until mid May, so finding green weed can be difficult until later in the season. However, we did locate large schools of northerns in many bays that were filled with dead brown scattered reeds and bulrushes. |
|||||||||||