Quetico Bronze

I had heard about the legendary smallmouth fishing opportunities present in Quetico PP, but I was still reluctant to move our annual trip south from the good waters of Wabakimi PP. After much debate we decided to give Quetico a try and see what kind of fishing action we might get into. We planned a seven night trip for late summer featuring both small lakes and some big bodies of water.

We entered and began our trek into Quetico hoping to catch some of the monster smallmouth we had all heard about so much. The fishing was pretty much on for most lakes eating walleye almost every night and catching several nice lakers, northerns and smallmouth, but no monsters by the third day. On the fourth day things began to change!

We started out that day fishing a shallow connector between two large lakes and drifted a long stretch of cabbage. The action was unreal. Within an hour we had landed three smallies between 18"-20", a 41" northern and two mid 20" walleyes - all from the same repeated drift along the cabbage line. Our day ended with several more nice walleye and three more 16" - 18" smallmouth bass - not a bad day.

On the fifth night I went out with my brother on a new lake (large body of water). We worked our way around some islands and found a nice looking bay full of cabbage, rocks and close to some very deep water. It looked perfect for big pike during the evening feed. We began our drift through the bay and the cabbage casting big bucktails in search of aggressive pike.

Our first drift produced two decent smallmouth and we lost a very big bronzeback in the weeds. We continued our drift throughout the evening catching smaller pike and some great smallmouth. The video shows four of the smallmouth we caught that night with the biggest coming in just over 21". The "twins" were are largest double hitters of the night with two others producing smaller bass and pike combos. This was our hottest night of the trip by far with the other canoe producing two more smallmouth between 21" - 22". All of the big smallmouth took bucktails too! We finished the night catching a couple of walleye for a late dinner and ended the trip catching one more bruiser smallmouth at 21" - on a bucktail.

Despite the heavier canoe traffic at Quetico the fishing was as spectacular as Wabakimi with the added bonus of bronzebacks! We will be back this year in August and hope for the same luck on some new lakes and two video cameras!