What do you do when the walleye bite is off? Scott Sime and Steven Wintemute, “The Weekend Warriors”, decide to make the best of a bad situation, and have a riot doing it…

Something interesting seems to happen every time Steve and I head out, and this first-ice trip was no exception. We had a great time with lots of laughs, some crazy twists and some big trout!

…on impulse I raise my rod back up and flick a cast out the other side of the boat. I’ve retrieved my spoon about halfway back when a trout smashes the spoon. The weight I feel tells me this is a decent fish too… double header!

I peek around the viewfinder of the video camera to see a trident-class submarine glide into view about two feet under the water. “Oohhhhhhh!” says Ron…

As I close my bail I can see my line running upstream. I reel tight and feel the weight of a scrappy fish. I report “fish on” just as Steve calls the same from his side of the boat. Double header grayling!

I lean back and set the hook forcefully. The fish I’ve hooked seems unimpressed with this, and swims away. My drag is tight enough so I can barely pull it with my hand, but this trout is lazily peeling line off my reel like the hose off a garden reel…

Rylan, the otherwise quite, reserved young man beside me is now yelling, holding his hands on top of his head like that kid from Home Alone. My heart-rate slips somewhere into hummingbird territory…

Well this is just tragic. The fish is so large it’s actually blown Ron’s mind. He’s been reduced to mumbling gibberish. I look back at Ron pulling the fish out of the net. This trout has a head the size of a watermelon…

…we are literally minutes away from the Manitoba/Nunavut border. This will mark my first excursion that breaches the 60th parallel. I’m having trouble remembering that fishing is actually the primary attraction here.

The Calm Air pilot dips into the throttles of our twin-turbo propped ATR 42-320 and we are thrown down the runway as the morning sun just starts to break the horizon. A few moments later the nose points skyward and we slip the surly bonds of earth…