For the last several years I have been fortunate enough to enjoy a winter fishing vacation at my buddy’s camp in northern Ontario, just south of Gogama. Gerry Heels has a cabin up there with two ski-doos that we use to fish different lakes each day. We usually go up there for a week around New Year’s and try to get in around mid-March as well.  Our target species include lake trout, splake, brook trout and occasionally rainbows.  One of the main lakes up there only has a short winter laker season, from mid-February to mid-March, so we planned our trip to coincide with the last few days of the lake trout season.  

With no signs of winter weather producing safe ice in southern Ontario anytime soon, my friend Gerry Heels and I were happy we had made plans to walk on hard water long in advance. It seems these late winters have now become the norm, so we booked our train tickets to northern Ontario and planned to spend six days ice fishing a couple of hours north of Sudbury over New Years.