Most Scott customers form a bond with their regular guide and often ask what they do in the off-season. It’s a tough group to keep track of but we have a lock on most of them. Not surprisingly hunting and fishing headlined most of the guide’s off season activities. After some southern Saskatchewan trout fishing, Head Guide CORY CRAIG took his family down to their winter home in Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica where he runs his saltwater charter fishing company (take a look at www.tropicfins.com for some exciting fishing opportunities). He has been busy there putting the finishing touches on his home and taking out his son Tosh for some inshore fishing.
CODY MYCHALYSHYN filled his fall with a lot of hunting and helped out at his family’s fishing lodge in Ontario. But he made time to head to Kansas City for the American Royal Barbecue Competition, the biggest in the states. Maybe Cody’s shore lunches next summer will have a little more kick. Soon Cody will head south to spend the rest of the winter roaming around South America. (It’s wonderful to be young. . .) And the young at heart, STEVE LINDER, much better known as BIFF, is also setting his sights for South America. He will be in Columbia soon, somewhere in a beach community just focused completely on inventing new ways of entertaining his Scott customers and maybe having a beer now and then. STEVE YANISH is staying put in Canada this winter. Steve has spent most of his off season getting his new hunting outfitting business, Alpine Valley Outfitters, off the drawing boards. He was successful. This fall he will be taking clients into a pristine mountain valley in British Columbia for some spectacular hunting. He did take some time out to bag a moose and a deer. GRAHAM COULOMBE also put a moose on ice this fall and has been doing a lot of work on his home near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
Speaking of moose no one on the Scott team knows moose better than JAN PHOENIX. We don’t call him the Yukon Man for nothing. Every year he brings home the moose meat. 
This fall he took three buddies and they went 4 for 4 with racks from 41 to 53”. He also teamed up with GREG HAMM to tame some of the monster rainbow trout on Lake Diefenbaker, a huge flowage of the Saskatchewan River, famous for equally huge rainbows. They both got lots of double digit bows and Jan almost broke the 20 pound mark with a 19.5 pound pig of a fish. Greg is taking care of business in Saskatoon as an electrician but will spend a lot of time on the ice this winter. After Christmas Jan will head to his traditional wintering grounds in Costa Rica, near Cory’s home port. 
Super-sub Scott guide JASON HAMILTON has spent the fall shooting geese and catching big muskies in between his work as a field biologist working on whale and walrus research in arctic waters. 
Another Hamilton, veteran guide PAUL HAMILTON has kept his line in the water, fishing for sturgeon in Saskatchewan and coho salmon in Alaska. His top fish this fall was a five foot long sturgeon. And he’s bagged a nice buck. He will be heading way up north shortly to continue his research work on arctic char in the inland lakes of Baffin Island. This involves incredible (really life threatening kind of stuff) snowmobile trips over arctic ice to reach remote lakes where char are netted under the ice—not a job for wimps.
Most of the Scott guides did a lot of hunting this fall but none had success like CURT WOLOSYN and CHESTER PORTEOUS, known to most as just The Poacher.
They teamed up on an extraordinary whitetail hunt on Curt’s family farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Curt and Poach always seem to bag big bucks but this year hit pay dirt. Using trail cameras, hunting savvy and a lot of just plain hard hunting, they each put massive whitetails on the ground (just look again at those photos). The biggest they named “Sr. Combs” and studied his movements for days. Poach got the chance and closed the deal—a true monster whitetail. 
Curt and Poach are both staying in Canada this winter. Curt is taking course work in Edmonton to earn his credentials as a National Construction Safety Officer. Poach will be studying the safety of the ice near his Winnipeg home, as he pulls 10-15 pound walleyes through it. JON WIMPNEY, or J5 if you prefer, has been logging a lot of hours as the sales ace for Scott Lake Lodge pulling in a record number of customers. But he has squeezed some time out for golfing, hunting and of course fishing. This fall he entered Canada’s largest walleye tournament and finished a very respectable 9th out of 160 entrants. He will be on the ice soon still looking for the walleye of a lifetime. And he is still looking for a few customers looking for their fishing trip of a lifetime. Call Jon just to shoot the breeze about fishing or book a trip at 306/209-7150.
Inspired by the hunting and fishing exploits of the Scott guides, owner TOM KLEIN spent enough time in the Montana mountains to bag a couple of elk and a whitetail buck. His freezer is full and his fishing obsession is in check, at least for a spell. He travelled back to his old stomping grounds in northern Wisconsin to catch his first musky on a fly and then trekked to the Agua Boa River, a tributary to a tributary of the Amazon, deep in the rainforest, to check out the peacock bass story. He can now verify that, yes, peacocks are a dynamite game fish. 
He brought about a dozen double digit peacocks to the boat on his 8 weight, including an 18 pounder. And as a bonus he got an arapaima or “lung fish” of 70 pounds or so to eat a fly, a fairly rare event. And then he landed the brute on his fly rod. This primitive fish, an air breather, grows to 400 pounds in the Amazon basin and has legendary fighting power. But he still thinks that lake trout caught in shallow water are the toughest freshwater fish he has encountered. So what’s General Manager JOHN GARIEPY been up to? With three kids five or under John is pretty busy around the house, keeping the kids and Scott Lake Lodge in line. But he will be on the ice soon both at Scott Lake and on Lake Winnipeg.
