Located on Otter Lake, within a half-hour drive of Parry Sound and only a few hours north of the GTA, the Grand Tappattoo is a beautiful resort. Situated on a prime piece of land with plenty of lodging, an indoor pool, sauna, and gym, all beside a private sandy beach, this lodge is an angler's dream. The lodge also offers hiking and biking trails, and if you prefer a winter vacation, you can enjoy cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and ice skating. There are also snowmobile trails nearby that connect to the resort for more adventures.
Grand Tappattoo offers the fantastic Forest Restaurant for three meals a day. The chefs will prepare a meal you won’t soon forget! They offer a mix of casual and fine dining options, with a stunning view of Otter Lake to keep everyone well-fed and happy.
We were looking forward to having fun on the water, heading out on our Lund and trying to figure out Otter Lake. We came with limited knowledge of the lake but knew there were plenty of bass and pike to be had. One thing about this lake is that there are plenty of back bays and inlets to hide from the wind if you had to. Unfortunately, we couldn’t bring this lake up on our Lowrance charting. But we had a good base map showing the shoreline. So, we kept it simple and just started casting the shoreline close to Grand Tappattoo. We kept an open mind while fishing and were there just to have fun and see what we could catch, with no target species in mind. We noticed a lot of fallen trees in the water, which we just had to pitch and flip, hoping for a big largemouth. We also noticed there wasn’t a lot of weed in the lake, aside from thin beds of dollar pads along some shorelines and a few thicker lily pad beds and slop in the back bays.
I suggest that if you’re after largemouth, just fish all the visual cover you can find. You won’t be disappointed. We covered a lot of the shoreline, happening upon pike fairly frequently. We spotted a few giants following our baits more out of curiosity, not hunger. This trip, we had our best success catching smallmouth bass eager to attack our Mavrik jerkbait and quite easily caught follow-ups with the Ned BLT. I’m estimating we caught over 40 smallmouth on one weed sand flat we found. We noticed bait busting the surface out from shore and instantly found the smallmouth underneath.
If you are new to the lake, I would suggest you do just as we did and just cast the shorelines with an open mind because you can catch largemouth, smallmouth and pike just about anywhere there.
When we headed back to the resort, everyone was out enjoying the sunshine with kids fishing from the dock, using kayaks and paddle boards and jumping on an awesome floating trampoline. Definitely a great spot to take your kids, fish and relax while they have fun.
