Think backcountry fishing mean an endless drive? Think again. This fly-in adventure was just hours from the city

A lake to figure out

Scotia Lake is long and narrow, rarely wider than 500 metres, but stretching roughly 18 kilometres from end to end, with a mixture of rocky shorelines, bays, a few beaches and some seriously deep water. On our sonar we saw spots plunge below 100 feet.

It’s the sort of lake that takes some figuring out, particularly when you’ve never seen it before. We worked bays, drop-offs, inflows and other structure, trying to determine where the fish were holding.

As we tried to crack the lake’s secrets, Mark, our resident botanist-geographer, turned out to be a big asset for reasons beyond his casting. On his second-ever fishing trip, he was already reading a contour map like someone with three decades of practice.

In retrospect, the timing probably wasn’t ideal for the shallow-water pattern we’d hoped for. Much of the weed growth in the bays was only getting started, leaving plenty of open water and some pretty deep places for fish to disappear into.

That gave us a lot of water to explore, and a good reminder that even on a little-fished backcountry lake, you don’t necessarily get to skip the “figuring-it-out” part.