Kasba Lake offers the triple crown of northern fishing: giant lake trout, hefty pike and stunning Arctic grayling

#1  Kasba Lake is like a different world, lost in time

Located in the temperate subarctic, Kasba Lake lies just a few kilometres north of Canada’s “four corners,” where the borders of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories meet. At 70 km long, and 35 km wide, it’s a huge body of water, with plunging depths, shallow bays, numerous inflows and outflows, all criss-crossed by eskers, and dotted with dozens of islands. Even better, Kasba is over 200 km from the closest road, and there’s nothing manmade on its shoreline other than Kasba Lake Lodge.

If you were to sit at a drawing table and design a lake to grow big northern fish, this is pretty much what you’d come up with. Add to that literally decades of careful conservation, with all large—and even medium-sized—fish being released to keep growing and spawning, and you’ve got a recipe for world-class angling. On my trip, for example, we kept a total of three four-pound lakers for a couple of shore lunches, and that was it. Everything else went back.

Once you’re just a few minutes away from the lodge’s dock, you can lose yourself among Kasba’s islands and channels and not see a single artifact of modernity all day. As you take in the expanses of water, rocky shorelines, pebble beaches, boggy meadows and sparse forest, you’re looking at a landscape that hasn’t changed since the last ice age, 11,000 years ago. The effect is pretty overwhelming. Even if you don’t fish, it’s an incredible place to visit. But for anglers, it’s pretty much heaven.