“Louisiana’s Buddy Oakes Heads to Canada with the Aglia, the Syclops and the Marabou”

Part 1: Northern Fish Eat Big Lures

Editor’s Note: How do you learn to catch walleyes and northern pike when 99.5% of your time has been spent catching saltwater fish like speckled trout and redfish? Why do you take your wife and your friends to Canada to catch coldwater species when you’ve never fished for these fish previously? How do you learn to fish for fish you’ve never had the opportunity to catch?

To learn the answers to these questions, we asked Buddy Oakes, marketing director and guide for Hackberry Rod and Gun in Hackberry, Louisiana, to tell us about his first northern exposure and the role that Mepps played in the success of his trip to Angler Rapids Wilderness Lodge (www.anglerrapids.com) in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Question: Buddy, you’re the marketing manager for Hackberry Rod and Gun in Hackberry, Louisiana. Your world is Lake Calcasieu and speckled trout, redfish and flounder. I know you also guide and fish with Mister Twister lures, including the RT Slug, the Natural Shrimp, and Mepps Little Wolf spoons. Why did you decide to go north to Canada to fish for northern pike and walleyes, which are fish about which you knew absolutely nothing?

Oakes: I have three friends with whom I fish regularly, and in 2008 we decided we’d take our wives with us on a fishing trip to Canada. None of us had ever been to Canada before, and we wanted to see what that fishing was like. One of our friends here in Hackberry, La., had told us about Angler Rapids Wilderness Lodge and said that at this comfortable lodge we could catch fish and also provide a great trip for our wives. We all agreed we wanted to learn about northern fishing. In the past, our trips had been to the Caribbean, Costa Rica or Mexico.

So I went on the Internet and checked-out the lodge. The lodge owner was really a nice guy on the phone. After we met them and the Cree Indian guides who worked with them, we were even more impressed. This lodge sits on about an acre and a half of rapids, and it’s really beautiful. To get to the lodge, we had to fly in by float plane.

We arrived at about 10 am, got our gear squared away and then had lunch. We paired-off with two people to the boat and fished until about 4 pm and caught fish all afternoon long. None of us had ever fished very much in fresh water, nor did we know what type of equipment or lures we would need. So I called Michael Sheldon and asked him to put together lure kits for us that we could use to catch walleyes and pike.

We had never seen lures like these. I got a kick out of just looking at the lures that the folks up in the far north fish used. They were huge lures with names like Syclops, Aglia, Black Fury, Comet Mino and Musky Killer - strange names I’d never heard. I had never seen a stranger-looking assortment of lures in my life. But I quickly learned that with the Mepps lures that we had, all we had to do was add water to catch fish.