Had enough of the daily grind?
Isn’t it time to reward yourself and your family by booking a vacation designed for everyone?
How about someplace in Northern Ontario just a short drive from the GTA?
We have a place for those with little ones or individuals with little patience for long drives. That place is in Corbeil, Ontario, a three-hour drive north on Highway 11 from Toronto, close to the city of North Bay on Lake Nosbonsing called Big Moose Camp.
Lake Nosbonsing is approximately sixteen hundred acres with its irregular shape. The lake is fed by Depot Creek and local springs and has the River Kaibuskong flowing out of the east and running into the Mattawa River. It’s separated into two halves by narrows and each part of the lake has several beautiful bays to fish in.
Nosbonsing offers all of the fishing benefits of its larger neighbour, Lake Nipissing. However, it is much quieter making it popular with less experienced anglers or those not wanting to deal with the expanse of water on Lake Nipissing.
Lake Nosbonsing is an angler’s paradise, open year-round and offering many fishing opportunities without the challenges of the big water. It’s an irregular-shaped lake that is approximately seven miles long. It is tucked away in the Almaguin Highlands, and the magnificent hills only add to the beauty of the lake. The lake plays host to walleye, northern pike, muskellunge, smallmouth and largemouth bass, and yellow perch. It’s a perfect setting to escape and enjoy picturesque views and all of the fishing that the lake has to offer.
Our trip to Lake Nos was in early September, a time when the forests are starting to colour and the predator species are thinking about fattening up for winter.
Despite all of the opportunities to chase the toothy critters or tasty walleye or jumbo perch, we decided to have a good old-fashioned ‘Bass Clash’ with Lake Nos smallmouth and largemouth bass. This lake is blessed with both natural structural elements as well as man-made offering the dedicated bass angler a wide variety of options and techniques or tactics to fish for bass.
I started my trip the first evening by fishing obvious rocky points and rock bars with noisy topwater baits by YoZuri and continually changed tactics on ‘hot looking’ locations by snap jigging micro tube jigs and Ned Rig micro craws dragged along the bottom. Caught a nice share of hard-fighting smallmouth on the snap tube and lost some even bigger ones, but that’s fishing, right?
The first morning was perfect. Dead calm conditions with a slight mist on the surface of the lake and as ideal as it gets for topwater baits like poppers, prop baits and my favourite on new lakes, the YoZuri Wake Bait, a lure that triggers bites when the bass just feel like blasting the surface.
I found some quiet back bays with thick weed beds leading to shoreline points and rock piles and started casting along the edge of the weed beds and fan casting to within feet of the shore and found some awesome, fat smallmouth bass that literally ate the wake bait with the familiar ‘toilet flush’ strikes, inhaling the bait.
After a great morning of brown bass bashing, I was now itching to catch some of lake Nos big green bass and picked up my heavy power St. Croix pitching stick, twenty-pound test line and a handful of soft plastic baits and fished some of the heaviest, nasty thick shallow weeds I could find on the lake.
Not ten minutes into my bass stalking, I set hook into my very first Lake Nos bucket mouth bass and the bass clash continued the rest of the afternoon. I caught them on man-made docks, in thick lily pads and eelgrass as well as the ever-abundant fallen trees along the shorelines of each back bay. Some beautiful largemouth up to four pounds were all caught and released.
At Big Moose Camp, all of the fourteen cottages are lakefront or lake view, have two or three bedrooms, a bathroom with a shower and hot water, drinkable water supplied from a well, a fully-equipped kitchen, propane forced air or electric heat, satellite HD TV and their own fire pit, picnic table and deck. There are boat and motor rentals, docking and launching facilities, bait and ice, kayaks, pedal boats, SUP and canoe rentals and ice fishing huts available for the guests staying at the resort.
Isn’t this the year to get back to living? Isn’t this the year for a good old-fashioned bass clash?
Reward your family or friends and check out Big Moose Camp
Contact them here: phone (9 am to 7 pm) at (705) 752-3738
