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

Part 5: Beat the Heat and Head North

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, what was your experience like fishing up north out of Angler Rapids Wilderness Lodge?

Oakes: The first few days, the weather was hot and muggy. On the third day, a cold front and rain came through and we all put on our rain suits and went fishing. That cold front slowed-down the bite, but we were still able to catch plenty of fish.

Question: What Mepps’ lure surprised you?

Oakes: They all did, because I’d never seen lures like these, and I couldn’t believe they’d catch fish. I guess the biggest surprise for me was when I started fishing the Timber Doodle. I cast it 20 or 30 times and didn’t get a bite. I put it down and started fishing with another lure, but Lynn decided she wanted to fish with it. So, our guide tied it onto her line. On the first cast she made, she caught a nice pike on it. Maybe she had the right presentation and I just didn’t give that lure enough time to catch fish.

Question: Would you advise anybody from the South to go north and try the fishing for walleye and pike?

Oakes: Absolutely. We’re going back. We went to Canada in August, and where we live, the temperatures are often over 100 degrees during that month. When we arrived in Canada, the temperatures were in the 50s and 60s. The fishing was fantastic, and this trip was a great break from the hot-weather fishing we have in south Louisiana. We made a lot of memories, took numerous pictures and caught a tremendous number of fish.

But I also learned that having the right equipment and the right lures really makes the perfect trip. I confirm that I had made the right decision by calling Michael Sheldon at Mepps and asking him to pick out the lures we needed to catch fish. When I got to the lodge and saw that the lures that we had brought were the exact same lures that the lodge had in its tackle shop, and that the guides were recommending, I was really confident that we’d catch some fish.

We’ve invited the folks from Angler Rapids Wilderness Lodge to come to Hackberry Rod and Gun Club this next year and let us show them how to use the Little Wolf spoons and some of the Mister Twister products to catch speckled trout and redfish. So we’ll have an exchange of cultures and fishing knowledge. I recommend that anyone from the South who has never been on a trip like this check it out.

We have some tremendous saltwater and freshwater fishing down here in the lower 48 states, but going to Canada helped me learn new techniques and catch fish I’d never seen previously. I can also escape the brutal heat of a Louisiana summer and have a good time in cool weather when you can fry eggs on the sidewalk in Louisiana. I’ve also learned that Mepps and Mister Twister products not only catch speckled trout and redfish, they’ll catch about any fish that swims.