Central Alberta Fly Tying Club: A Very Challenging Week in the Parkland Region of Manitoba

Monday, October 1, 2018

A Very Challenging Week in the Parkland Region of Manitoba

What a week! Snow, cold, severe wind chill and tough conditions on the water made for a very challenging week of fly fishing in the Parkland Region of Manitoba. The week started off with a nasty 20 cm snow storm the night before we travelled to Russell, Manitoba. After studying the weather radar and looking at road conditions, we opted for a longer drive by way of Calgary-Medicine Hat-Regina and finally up to Russell just across the border into Manitoba. We had a bit of a convoy for safety too!

After a very long day of driving where we managed to miss most of the bad weather except for the first and last hour of the trip, we arrived at the Russell Inn! The Russell Inn is an amazing place to set up for the week. Everybody is friendly. Great customer service is very important to them.

Once set up, our first stop was Patterson Lake. Patterson Lake used to be the crown jewel of the Parkland Trout fisheries. Patterson Lake's biomass of fish has sadly shifted from trout to suckers. There are definitely still good numbers of browns and rainbows in the lake but the food base in the lake is being consumed mainly by the suckers. Sadly, trying to manage the sucker population is next to impossible. Efforts with electrofishing does get several thousand suckers out of the lake but that barely makes a dent in their ever increasing population.

We did catch several big rainbows and a few browns. The trout population overall is way down, although there are still some monsters in the lake.

Our next stop was Twin Lakes. Bad weather was again challenging us. The day was highlighted by my friend, Claude, catching a tiger trout in the 28 inch category. A beautiful trophy to say the least. As Claude would say, Patience is the key!

West Goose Lake did give up several nice fish including a brown that Stuart caught. Unfortunately, both East and West Goose Lakes have bass, perch, and walleye competing with the browns and rainbows for forage and other food sources.

The surprise of the trip was Corstorphine Lake. Corstorphine last fall, in a word, was amazing BUT there was mismanagement with the aerators that resulted in a winter/spring ice off kill. Fortunately there was a decent number of fish that survived. This is the third failure in managing the aerators properly at this lake. Frustrating!

The good news was the fact that we caught several trophies at Corstorphine that included specimens in the high 20s size wise. The forage base in this lake is amazing. The rainbows and perhaps browns will get large fast, really fast.

Our second trip to Corstorphine included a water temperature heading down toward 40F. That means the lake was starting to turn over. The visibility in the lake was down to 10 inches. That was also a frustrating result of a very cold fall and I am sure wind was a factor too!

The fishing was quite inconsistent, although we had many great moments. We made the best of a challenging week and had some fun and a reasonable amount of success throughout the trip.

I remain optimistic that these trophy lakes will be back to their former glory. I hope that FLIPPR gets its act together and gets these lakes back to their trophy status.

Allowing scented bait, ice fishing, unchecked shore fishing, poorly managed fish populations, and failure to properly manage the aerators has created a down turn of these amazing lakes. The upside is that Spear Lake is going to be restocked with trout this coming spring.

The infrastructure is already in place at Pybus Lake, Tokaryk Lake (not a FLIPPR lake), Spear Lake, Corstorphine Lake, The Gooses, and Twin Lake as well as several others. I hope FLIPPR and Manitoba Fisheries can get the lakes with poor fishing opportunities back to being as productive as we have seen them in the past.

To watch several groups cut their trip short and go home because the fishing was sub par should make FLIPPR do some soul searching. This impacts the local economy and service industry as well.

I want to be part of the solution. Many others do too! How can we help? Throwing money at the problem is NOT the solution. Great leadership, vision and ACTION will get the job done! Adjusting the regulations, enforcing those regulations and shifting the biomass within the lakes back to trout will be challenging BUT it can be done.