Fishing is a lot like playing the lottery: you buy your tickets, and you take your chances. For several consecutive weeks we had a ton of winning tickets. Weeks 4 through 6 were particularly gangbuster groups, averaging 179 trophy fish per week with an average of 18 pike that hit or exceeded 44 inches. That was a lot of winning. Then the Week 7 group arrived bringing, of course, high expectations. Most of our guests follow our season online, checking the Tundra Times daily and our weekly Blog posts as well. But this time when the winning tickets were posted only a few of our Week 7 guests had a trophy payout. The simple truth can be framed in raw numbers: 89 total trophies were landed with just five of those pike at or above that 44” mark. And if your last name wasn’t Myhre there was only one really big pike. Peter Myhre and his son James claimed four of those five giant pike including a 45, 46 and 47. So they had a memorable big fish trip, as did Todd Phillips who won the tussle with a Scott Lake 43.5” lake trout, a massive fish that will be a lifetime memory for Todd. There were other bright spots: Mike Manship had a wonderful four-trophy day on pike; Mike Sackash caught three trophy pike and a trophy lake trout in a single day; Rob Williams pulled an 18” grayling out of the rapids on a fly out; Arin St. Cyr and Patrick Finan found heavy 38” lake trout at the bottom of their guide’s net. Those were the fishing highlights, but it’s a short list compared to the previous weeks.

As usual, the culprit for low trophy weeks is easy to identify—the weather. Great pike fishing and sunshine go together like ham and eggs. But the weather for this group was more like an egg on the face. It was terrible. The total sunshine over five days was measured in minutes not hours and whatever we got was on the last afternoon when most of our guests were enjoying their wrap-up late shore lunch. The low point was the cold, nasty fourth day of the trip when only eight trophy fish were brought to the boat with the biggest pike a 41.5-incher. The week had started great with a 38 trophy-day on the first day when conditions were cloudy but still warm. If you look at the photos in the Tundra Times for Week 7 you can see the anglers without coats on Day 1 and for the rest of the week you see an abundance of coats, hoodies and stocking caps (toques here in Canada). Ironically if we look at the long history of trophy totals at Scott Lake Lodge, going back 27 years, standing tall as the #1 top trophy week is Week #7 (or back in our early days of a 7-day trip the week closest to the second week of July). Fishing, like life, often just isn’t fair.

But this was mainly a group of Scott veterans, many with a long Week 7 history. They remembered the blue skies, sunshine and aggressive, active pike and grayling ready to eat anything that floated over their heads. So it will be again. Bad luck just happens.

What also happens every week at Scott Lake is extraordinary customer service with options for a lot of non-fishing activities. With the cool weather the sauna was fired up and the hot tub was busy. So was the workout facility. Some of our guests even did a dip in the lake, cool but energizing. The dinners were lively with conversations and many fish tales were told, some even true. Actually, there were plenty of fish landed over the week. In cool weather the non-trophy, smaller pike fish are still quite cooperative. The numbers were great for most anglers and there were plenty of pike for shore lunches. Bent rods were not the issue; it was the size of the bends compared to past years. The recent fires on Scott Lake provided a good foraging ground for morel mushrooms, which the kitchen cooked up as steak toppers for the last supper. As has been the case all season, wildlife sightings were common with moose, bear and muskox spotted. For first-timers at Scott, it was still amazing fishing. Compared to fishing in guest’s home areas even this low trophy count still provided more big fish action than they could have imagined. Everything is relative, including fishing success. A measure of our guest’s confidence in this fishery? Most of the crew re-booked right at the lodge and will give Week 7 another chance in 2025. Let’s hope the lottery numbers tumble around and bring back a regular Week 7. Odds are: it will.