It was a Friday evening and I wasn’t quite sure on what the weekend plans were just yet when I received a text message from a Facebook friend asking what my plans were for fishing this weekend as him and his brother wanted to get out somewhere. I replied back saying that I was hoping to get up to the lake and threw out an invite for to them to join me if they’d like. He said that sounded great and wanted me to give him a call to work out some minor details on times, location, what to bring etc. So I called and we were set to meet at the lake for about 8:30am on Saturday. This was a bit of a late start for me but it was doable non the less. We met up and set up our campers and had a quick bite to eat. I previously told them that I had all the tackle we needed and when we went to pack up the boat they laughed as I came walking over with 4 giant tackle boxes full of huge pike lures. With little room to spare and it already being closer to noon we headed to get a glimpse at the lake, it was calm in the bays on the west but the rest of the lake was white capping pretty bad so with little options on where to go we decided on a spot and headed out. It was quite hot out already and I wasn’t sure from previous trips this year on how pike fishing would be. Upon arrival to the spot I explained we’d try casting and if they weren’t hitting on the cast that we’d troll instead to cover more ground and hopefully get into some. We casted for some time and didn’t have much luck so we started to troll, it wasn’t long after we had a fish on! It was a mid 30 inch pike and we were happy. We continued to troll when I had another hit and a hard pull that snapped my leader open and stole my lure. I was quite disappointed as I didn’t even get to see the size of the fish. Through out the day it was extremely hot on the lake but the wind kept things feeling not so bad. We caught multiple fish and kept a few smaller ones to bring home for a meal. We headed in around supper time and filleted the 5 pike that we kept. I learnt to fillet pike at about the age of 12. My great grandparents the Sackett’s were commercial fishermen and our family including my grandparents, uncle, mom all helped out with that so they knew how to fillet fish well and passed it down to me. I showed my friends how to remove the y bone and even let one try it out on the last fish, he did a great job. My mom runs a food truck called Gator’s grub and was able to hook us up with a great supper from there, we had pulled pork sandwiches and they were delicious. After our bellies were full we decided to head out on the pontoon boat for an evening ride and if course more fishing, we ended up getting another fish and some great sunset photos before we headed in for the night. It was going to be an early morning as we planned to get up at 3:30am to hit the water. It was roughly 11:30pm by the time I got to bed. My alarm came quickly but I jumped up like a kid on Christmas day and made my coffee and headed down to the picnic table at the beach where I drink my coffee and watch the sun come up then I went over to their camper to find no one awake yet so I texted them and they were quickly up and we loaded the boat. This day we decided to head back to the same spot as there was not much of a wind yet and we did well there the day before. Once we were at our spot we did some casting and trolling, the bite didn’t turn on until about 9 o’clock. With sore arms from throwing huge baits and with the wind picking up we were thinking of packing it in early. We were on open of our final trolls when I had a big fish come out of nowhere and smash my lure, a quick hook set and snap!! My rod broke!! Although I had multiple rods on the boat this was an easy decision to make to head in. We headed back in white caps and loaded the boat. We headed back to the campers and I rolled the Ultraskiff (a 1 man fishing boat) to the shore where I let them both go for a ride on it and try it out. I had another friend in the area eager to try it out as well so I let him take his kids out on it. That was the end of our trip and we’ll be back at it soon!