Day 2 started off with a spectacular sunrise over Yellowknife. We all were excited to get to Plummer's Lodge and get our fly rods out! We got to Summit Air early. Summit Air is a charter company and their turbo prop bombardier flew 41 of us to Plummer's Arctic Lodge! The flight into the lodge takes about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Chummy Plummer's 5500 foot gravel runway was in perfect shape. Once we touched down, a fury of activity began. The guides quickly began unloading the plane and Chummy Plummer and his head guide Chuck were right there to greet us. Reid gave us all a big hug. We were his first guests ever that he had guided that he knew. He was excited too!
Once we deplaned, we were boated across a bay to the lodge where our bags were delivered to our cabin! The cabins are nicely set up. Karen and I had our own room as did Jay, Leon and Rick. There were two washrooms in our cabin, complete with a heater, showers and a central area where we had a great view of the bay in front of the lodge. We headed over to the main lodge to get our lunch, fishing licences, a brief orientation and then we got ready to head out to lake trout fly fish before supper. We had about 5 hours.
Our guide for the afternoon was Alex Ginther. Karen and I rigged up a twelve weight and a 10 weight rod with full sink lines and Bauer Rigs. Nicolas Bauer designed a neat clip system to add a wiggle tails onto our deceiver/clouser hybrid that we designed for the trip!
We motored out to the Narkay Islands. It was a windless beautiful warm afternoon and we all were catching medium sized lakers that this set of islands is noted for. We only had to motor about 7 miles to the islands. We could not believe how clear the water was. We could clearly see the lake trout right down to 25 or 30 feet! There are 4 subspecies of lakers: butterflies, green backs, great greys and redfins. Rick and Leon caught all 4 subspecies on the first afternoon! Jay caught several too.
By 6:30 pm we were motoring in for supper. Karen and I caught about 20 lakers- the largest about 13 pounds. Great Bear Lake has giant lakers but were were quite satisfied with our afternoon! The trip was off to an excellent start.
Little did we know that the next three days were going to be very exciting. We were going to be the first group to head to the Tree River on the arctic coast in Nunavut to fly fish for arctic char!
Chummy Plummer and his head guide Chuck greeting the plane!
Reid was glad to see we had arrived safely!
Motoring over to the lodge from the airport!
The pictures on the wall were quite interesting. To see past Presidents of the USA on the wall, along with many celebrities was quite neat!
Off to the Narksy Islands to fly fish!
Our cabin was just perfect. Rustic and it had all the amenities!
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