LAKE KABETOGAMA— The big picture windows at the lakeside bar and grill at Sandy Point Lodge here overlooked a wide expanse of whitecaps on the morning of fishing opener. But anglers were in short supply, as a stiff northwest breeze sent windchills into the teens and anglers looking for protected spots to try to wet a line.
Chilly was the word of the day. The ice had cleared from Kabetogama, or “Kab” as most locals call it, just five days earlier, on May 4. And with cool and cloudy conditions leading up to the opener, the water temperatures were hovering around 40 degrees, according to the few anglers who did come in off the water to the public landing at the national park visitors center.
That suited one group of anglers just fine. They were on the hunt for trophy walleye, the big fat females that lumber into the shallows to spawn shortly after the ice goes out. The cold conditions were likely to keep those trophies concentrated near spawning sites, rather than dispersed throughout the lake where they are harder to find. Even so, like most of those who did venture out, the bite was slow.
That wasn’t surprising, said Al Bistodeau, the owner of Sandy Point Lodge, a family run resort that has become an annual pilgrimage for many long-time guests. Al’s daughter Brooke and son-in-law Tanner now handle a lot of the day-to-day running of the resort.
Al said opener is typically too early for good fishing on Kab. He predicts this coming weekend through Memorial Day and into early June, when the water finally warms, will offer up the best opportunities. For anglers looking for big walleye, Kab is currently in a sweet spot, with large numbers of fish over 18 inches. That puts most of them into the 18-26-inch protected slot, but as more anglers turn to catch-and-release anyway, that slot matters less and less.
Busy Gateway
For those heading to Kab, the Gateway Store along Hwy. 53 is a typical stop. Besides gas and groceries, they’ve got a wide assortment of bait, and they were doing a brisk business on opener morning. Owner Andrew Boelk, who was working the till, said it was busier still the day before. “It was crazy,” he said, with anglers picking up mostly shiners and rainbows, the usual go-to bait for the early season.
Those who turned out here for opener were mostly following family tradition. Located on the edge of Voyageurs National Park, resorts and cabins on Kab are largely limited to the lake’s southwest shore, and most of the families that retain property there have decades of history associated with this sprawling, 26,000-acre lake.
That’s the case with Ryan Turner, of rural Eveleth, who was up for the weekend with his family. Spending opener on Kab has been a decades-long tradition for his wife’s family and its one he has been happy to make his own. Turner’s mother-in-law, Donna Leese, has been coming to Kab during the summers since before the creation of the park in 1975.
Turner had been out for a short while earlier in the morning with his wife Amy and three kids, but had come back in after experiencing “technical difficulties.”
He said they planned to go back out later but suggested they might just fish from the resort’s long cribbed docks, that form a kind of protected harbor for boats. “It’s world class dock fishing here,” said Turner, who thought for a moment, then added: “I don’t know if I should give that secret away.”
Turns out Al had already mentioned it, since it’s not the kind of detail most resort owners would want to leave unstated.
While Turner married into the Kab tradition, he said he’s been a regular now for 19 years and he and his wife are passing on the experience to their kids, Ben, Emma, and Joseph, now ages 11, 13, and 15.
“The kids saw their first northern lights up here,” he said. While they’ve since seen the auroras from their home in Fayal Township, Turner said there’s no comparison to seeing the lights from Kab, as they dance across an almost impossibly dark sky. With nothing to the north but the uninhabited Kabetogama Peninsula and hundreds of miles of sparsely inhabited Canadian forest, the park is internationally celebrated as a dark sky sanctuary.
Trout fishing along
the highway
While most anglers were battling the wind on Saturday, Jim Aker, of Orr, decided trout fishing with his best buddy, Tucker, a spunky little terrier, was a better bet. The DNR had recently restocked several hundred brown trout in the Ash River, north of Ash Lake, and Aker was giving them a go with a small spinner tipped with earthworms.
Though the river was bog-tinted, it was clear enough to see some of the eight-inch browns surfacing in calmer stretches of the river, and Aker’s spinner was definitely getting their attention. It looked like fresh trout would be part of his dinner plans that evening, and that’s about the best any angler can hope for on opening day.