Last Winter Trip - Long Lake

We have decided to add another annual trip to our winter fun... one to Long Lake. This wasn't our first time fishing or camping on the lake, but it was the first time doing it in Spring. Conditions were quite a bit different, and we learned a lot about the lake for this time of year. 

I won't beat around the bush, fishing was horrible. We only landed a handful of small burbot and hooked into a couple tiny trout. Nobody else on the lake was catching anything either. In fact, state wide the fishing was horrid. I talked with a couple fishing guide friends and they said their clients did not catch a single fish during their guided trips that weekend either. There must have been something odd about the moon phase and atmospheric pressure. 

This is Danielle and Ashton going for a joy ride on the snowmachine while I'm stuck shoveling off 2 feet of snow from a 12 x 12 area for our tent. One day Ashton will be big enough to help :)

They stopped by the truck to grab a small load too. 

Half-way to clearing the snow.

This is Ashton's side of the tent. Not pictured is our side, with bunk cots taking up the entire area. That little propane stove does an amazing job of keeping the tent warm, however, the top bunk person gets COOKED!

I missed the good sunrise... this is the aftermath. 

The view out our door. 

Danielle emerging from the tent. 

Ashton and I were trying to find a good fishing spot near our tent. The drop offs on this lake are crazy. A couple of feet horizontally meant a possible drop in 10 or more feet of depth. 

This kid is a fishing addict. He loves catching, but would rarely get bored of just dropping the line to the bottom and then reeling it back in. Good thing too because very little catching was happening this weekend. 

Ski time for the ski team. This means a work-out for mom and nap time for Ashton. 

I explored some new areas of the lake. Danielle skied across it to meet up with me and took a nap on the machine... well earned. 

Our back drop was scenic too. You can probably see why there are such steep drop offs in the lake. Interesting this... in the spring when things start thawing, the rocks from the peak at the top start expanding and massive boulders occasionally shoot down the mountain. We weren't in any danger where our tent was because of the many trees behind us. However, we did find a couple huge boulders on the lake in different areas where there wasn't anything stopping their momentum. 

And here is an example of a boulder that made it to the lake... crossing over the highway on its way down!

Lunch time!

Aston loves playing with the Alaskan animal toys Gigi got him!

This was the first mosquito of the season... way too early. 

Ashton gets special treats when we are camping and fishing... fruit by the foot is one of them. 

YUM!

We tried a new snack as well... Gatorade soaked snow.

Tundra was soaking up the rays too. Little does he know that this snow will soon be gone, he will be too hot, and he will be missing the snow. 

We somehow got all of us on the snowmachine and decided to take a selfie :)

The snow was perfect for making a snowman. Ashton enjoyed it... or rather enjoyed hitting him with a stick. 

And this is the mess we woke up to our last morning! There was 8 inches of water inside the tent and everywhere around us :( Luckily the water didn't reach the bottom of our cot or the pack & play crib... however, Tundra was sleeping on the ground and wasn't too dry. Him along with our bags, stove, and clothes were all soaked. Good thing it was nice and toasty in the tent!

Here is what it looked like without the tent. 

The ground tarp started floating in all the water. 

Here is Ashton and Mommy fishing. No fish, but a good example of "fishing" he would do all day if he could. 

Annual Crosswinds Trip

I have created blog entries before about Crosswinds, and I will continue to do so yearly because this is an annual trip we look forward to. It used to be just myself and Danielle doing this, but after Ashton was born, Kevin replaced Danielle. Eventually, the family will be old enough and work schedules will align where we can all start doing this trip together.

As in the past, the main goal of this trip is to catch enough burbot to host our annual fish fry. I have finally learned over the years that we don’t need to keep our limit to supply enough meat for the fish fry. The past years we have had too much and a huge amount of left overs (not to mention a lot of time to prepare and fry up extra fish). This year I decided I only needed to keep 5 large burbot. I’m fairly sure this will be enough fish for the fish fry with minimal left overs. We shall see.

The trip almost didn’t happen this year. I was very nauseous on Tuesday and couldn’t eat or drink anything really all of Wednesday and Thursday. I started to feel a little better on Friday and I really didn’t want to bail on Kevin (and have to get fish for the fish fry a different way). I decided to go knowing I would likely start to feel better but I let Kevin know I would likely be a sack of potatoes.

We loaded everything the night before so we could get an early start on Saturday morning. We left around 5AM hoping to be on the trail around sun rise. On our way north, we actually saw a large black wolf run across the road in front of. That was pretty cool to see; unfortunately we couldn’t get a picture taken quick enough.

The ride in was actually very smooth compared to other times. I was glad to see this because a bumpy ride is the opposite of what my stomach needed! One thing that was worse than prior years was frozen overflow. There were a couple places where we got stuck or slid off the trail due to the ice.

We got to our camping spot in good time. I forget how quick it is to actually ride somewhere when you don’t have to slow down for a dog running along side you. Once we got to our spot, we had remove a 12x12 area of snow to place the tent. The snow was a couple feet deep and my body was empty of calories. I tried my best to help, but Kevin had to do most of the clearing because I wore out too quick.

We eventually got the area cleared and the tent setup. When we were putting everything into the tent, we realized that there was some miscommunication between Kevin and I. We both think it’s the other person’s fault so I won’t give you a biased reason why, but in summary, we didn’t have the right equipment to set up our bunk cots. This meant we had to sleep on the ground the entire trip. We thought it would be cold sleeping directly on the ice, but it turned out to not be too bad.

Our next order of business was finding a good place to put the fishing hut for burbot jigging, as well as setup the tip-ups. I had a GPS location saved from the year prior where we jigged for burbot, but we were surprised to find it was only 5 feet deep. We thought our spot was 10 feet deep but we decided try it out anyway because we already set up all of our gear and it would have took a while to move.

It wasn’t quite dark yet so we got all the tip-ups set as well. We decided to fish some of the deeper holes for Lake Trout while we waited for sunset. Lucky us we hooked into a couple of nice ones.

The sun was finally setting so we transitioned to inside the hut. Last year, the fishing was great and we didn’t think it could be any better this year. Thankfully… we were wrong… it was better! As soon as the sun set, the burbot showed up. We quickly caught our limit of 5 burbot each and moved to catch and release fishing. We also had to pull all the tip ups out of the water because burbot typically swallow those hooks and we didn’t want a burbot swallowing a hook when we couldn’t keep it now. It’s a bunch of work to set tip ups, and we had to pull them shortly after setting them… but that’s ok because that’s a good problem to have.

The good things about the burbot bite being hot is that you can experiment with presentations. In doing this, I have now found my new favorite lure (sorry, I can’t share). I bought this lure thinking it may work good for trout and descent for everything else, but I soon found out that the burbot absolutely hammer it! Fishing 3 feet from another lure (Kevin’s) also helps for comparison… and it hurts their feelings too when I’m catching all the fish J

Since we hammered the burbot the night before, we really didn’t have much planned for the rest of the trip. We decided to sleep in and target lake trout on different parts of the lake during the days. At night, we would catch and release more burbot which was a blast, especially because the first night was probably the worst night of fishing!

Overall it was a fun, extended weekend. We got plenty of meat to supply the fish fry with!  

I think this was the first fish of the trip... a Lake Trout we caught while waiting for the sun to set on the first day. 

Check out these ice crystals that formed on our stuff over night. 

More ice crystals. 

Enjoying the sun.

Not a beast Lake Trout... but not too shabby. 

This was the biggest burbot of the trip. It's not the best picture but you can see the size. 

I found this cool grate that we can attach to the buddy heater. It allows us to cook and warm up food. We decided to warm up some moose summer sausage and man was it good!

I was fishing this hole often during the day. I kept seeing big fish on the flasher (fish finder) until one finally hammered my jig. He hammered it so hard he broke the line when I set the hook :( I then tied on a different jig and fished the same hole. I knew that big fish likely wouldn't come back, so I was looking for a different monster. Well I found one! You can tell from this picture that the next fish I hooked in to broke my pole. I ended up loosing him when I tried to reel him in too. That made two large fish in a row that I didn't land!! 

This is the view from our tent on a snowy day. You can see how far away the hut is... kind of weird it was only 5 feet of water there. 

Home sweet home for the weekend.

One of Kevin's burbot. Looks like he pulled it completely straight for the picture. 

This is an aftermath picture. I had to hang all of our gear in the garage to dry it out. Unfortunately, my ceiling rod holders weren't secure enough and the heavy, wet tent brought the whole thing down. 

Check out this video of a burbot I caught. This guy had a nasty cut under his jaw that the the lake lie and warms found. Hungry anyone? I didn't keep this fish :)

Winter Fishing... and Byers Lake

We have a new fishing nut in the family. This kid is addicted to fishing!! It’s a lot of pressure on a guy when a toddler doesn’t understand the difference between fishing and catching. Ashton thinks catching is the norm and when I can’t find the fish or they aren’t biting good… he is not happy!

 Mommy and Ashton getting the ice hole ready.

Ashton reeling them in with his buddy Tundra keeping a close watch. 

Ashton and Tundra at it again. 

Dinner anyone? Such a provider.

Here's our home away from home... Tundra is keeping close watch of everything outside the hut. 

It's as tall as Ashton!! Not really, its a good angle. 

It wasn't small though :)

We decided to book a cabin at Byers lake this January for a long weekend of ice fishing and remote cabin life. We were hoping there was enough snow to snowmachine into the lake and we didn’t have a repeat of the snow conditions four years earlier (the trails were closed to machines and we had to pull our stuff in = COMPLETE NIGHTMARE). We invited our friends Brittany and Kevin, and their pups.

Cabin 2 was ours for the weekend. I highly recommend this cabin for families with kids because it has a loft where they can sleep and do their own kiddo things. The loft also has a window that faces north with a spectacular view of Denali when she is out in full force. The loft isn’t really realistic with a one year old tho… but that didn’t keep Ashton from trying to climb the ladder and play up there.

I have been fairly forgetful lately, and of course, the one thing I forgot, it impacted Danielle and not me. Danielle was looking forward to a weekend of cross-country skiing, but that’s a little difficult to do without the poles. Oops L She improvised with Brittany and they each shared one ski pole when they went together. Meanwhile, I felt really bad but I blame my dad, AKA Forgetful Fred, for the short term lapses.

Fishing was the goal for the weekend, but unfortunately, the fish (at least big fish) didn’t cooperate. I know there are large rainbow trout on the lake, but I can’t seem to dial them in. The other frustrating thing is that the burbot and lake trout there are super easy to catch, but it seems like adult fish don’t exist for some reason. And that pretty much was the story of the weekend… catching tiny fish. Putting tip-ups out is difficult as well, because these darn baby burbot somehow find a way to swallow the bait and hook that are two times bigger than their mouth. Regardless, Kevin found a way to catch older, baby fish and kept a bunch to take home. Turns out there was enough meat on five small ones to make a couple meals worth.

The wind was probably the biggest issue while on Byers this trip… but that also explains the warm weather. It was difficult fishing in the wind, but to get out of it meant putting up the ice hut without it turning into a kite. This wasn’t too easy doing it solo… and not knowing where the fish are.  The second biggest issue was Ashton’s sleep schedule. Both of us were just getting over a nasty cough and cold so his sleep patterns were already off. That combined with him not being in his normal crib meant he wouldn’t sleep the best. When he doesn’t sleep, dad doesn’t sleep, but who needs sleep anyway?

The last morning of weekend we woke up and saw 5 grouse hanging out outside the cabin. It’s illegal to shoot a gun within a mile of the lake, but it isn’t illegal to hunt. That means hunting with rocks! We were able to drop one grouse, but almost threw our arms out trying to get the others. It’s always fun trying to bring home meat with a rock as the weapon!

Overall it was a good weekend. We got away from Anchorage, enjoyed the hard water, relaxed in the cabin, and didn’t have much we needed to do. We will likely do this trip every so often as the kid(s) get older.

The view around the lake. 

The angle was a little off, but here's the crew in front of the cabin. 

The pup gang.

Look at this little stinker... he's in the loft looking out the window and making faces at us. 

Here is a view inside the front door.

 

Catching more fish. 

Ashton loves to grab the fish, so we just let him. It's not easy getting the stink out of them. 

We love it when it's warm enough to take the gloves off = no stinky mittens!

Pulling up the tip up... This was the first tip up Ashton has brought up. He got the hang of it quickly. 

Got it! Burbot on the ice! 

 

Nap time means sleeping on my lap while I jig and fish. It's tough being a little dude needing rest when the fishing is hot!