Any conversation about trophy muskies always includes Eagle Lake, and any discussion about where to stay on Eagle Lake includes Andy Myers Lodge. Last fall, we filmed an episode of The Musky Hunter with pro guide Steve Herbeck and lodge owner Julian Kalka. Both Steve and Julian have a wealth of knowledge on Eagle Lake: Steve’s a legendary guide on the lake, and Julian has lived on the Lake his whole life.
Unfortunately, despite all this firepower of knowledge, we were met with the first major cold front of fall, which brought freezing temperatures at night, bright skies, and light east winds. Anyone who has ever cast a musky lure would realize that the deck was stacked against us. However, anytime you are musky fishing in Northwest Ontario on Eagle Lake, you are literally one cast from being a hero.
Andy Myers Lodge is located on the famous Eagle Lake in Vermillion Bay, Ontario, Canada, approximately 140 miles north of International Falls, Minnesota. Eagle Lake encompasses some 63,000 acres, with approximately 500 islands. There’s no way you can fish it all, but if you break it into fishable sections, and focus on them, it’s very manageable.
Andy Myers Lodge is the ultimate lodge for the musky hunter—it has fantastic cabins, a large main lodge, great docking facilities with electricity, but most importantly it has the best collection of guides anywhere throughout Ontario. It’s all about information exchange and helping the guests catch more fish. There are evening seminars, and the guides mark maps and even provide GPS waypoints for spots, which is something you typically don’t see. Julian makes it a point that no customer is going to be treated like a number, and they do everything possible to help the guest get on the fish!
During our television shoot, we fished a lot of the lake. We fished the many islands around camp in Vermillion Bay and journeyed down the clear waters of the West Arm in the evenings. On another day we fished the central portion of the lake, and on the final day, we ventured to the east end of the lake with stained water near Boulder Bay. One of the incredible advantages of fishing at Eagle Lake is that you can fish in a variety of water colours and types of structures. Each of the different sections can fish like an entirely different lake, and when the muskies are biting in one section, the guides will tell you where to go.
We had fish chasing Cowgirls, large 9” Shallowraiders, DepthRaiders, and Bulldawgs. You can see the muskies coming from a far distance in the clear waters of Eagle, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending upon how nervous you get when a 50-inch musky is sniffing your lure! At the end of the trip, we caught fish on bucktails and Bulldawgs, as some fish were always active over the shallow rocks. But given the weather conditions, the muskies were not really active overall, and the Bulldawg was the best tool to get them to bite.
I have been fishing Eagle Lake for over 30 years, and this is one place where musky fishing has definitely gotten better with time. You can still see and catch the Eagle Lake giant muskies; however, catch and release, the 54-inch size limit and a few great spawns have produced an influx of a bunch of muskies in the 38- to 42-inch category. So it’s common to get musky action every day.
I remember the days when fishing Eagle was about working hard for an entire week in search of one bite from a trophy. Those days are no more. There’s a big, thriving population of muskies on Eagle Lake, and when you stay at Andy Myers Lodge, their guide staff will increase your odds and put you on the muskies.
