From there i drove to Matheson and spent the night in a hotel to head out first thing in the morning. The road into the trail head ended up being more or less plowed to about 10 km from the lake (or 6 km if you take the sketchy route). The road in - snow was about 3 to 4 feet in the bush and banks on the road were about 6 or 7 feet:
The trailhead:
Trail quickly narrows to this:
There were two options at the trailhead. First is a longer wider trail that most people use (10 km). Second is a shorter less traveled trail (6 km). I chose the shorter trail first time going in but subsequently used the longer wider trail as the shorter trail had two significant mudholes and a small river crossing. The weather was warm (2 to 5 degrees C) so i opted to not use the hut and because i was closer to the truck than expected i slept in the snowmobile trailer instead of setting up camp on the lake. Typically setup:
The view from the hole:
The first fish i caught was a micro walleye:
Remainder of the walleye were all 13 to 16 inches (kept and ate four of these each day):
Also caught a bazillion mooneyes:
Kept a dozen of them to try. Gonna fry them up tomorrow. Ice was 2 inches of white ice followed by about 6 inches of slush followed by 30 inches of ice for a total hole length of +/- 38 inches. Below that maybe 5 or 6 feet of water - don't really even need a reel as you never have more than 8 or 9 feet of line out. The bite was incredibly light/soft. With my most sensitive light action rod most times i could not feel it at all - my line instead would start moving sideways across the hole. Took some getting used to and even by the end i was maybe connecting about 20% of the time - but that's okay because bites were so frequent that even a 20% hookup meant lots of fish.
Everything went essentially according to plan with no real surprises on this trip other than a sunburned face.
