Fall Fun at God’s River Lodge 2023
Fall Fun at God’s River Lodge 2023
Overview – In 2022 my son had finished his education and wanted to go fishing with dad again. It had been almost 10 years since we had last done a fly in and based on scheduling and cost, I knew I needed a September trip. Thankfully God’s River was offering a Fall 50% off deal, and I jumped on it. In truth I had my eye on Good’s River for the brook trout fishing for a long time. I didn’t need much of an excuse to get up there and my son’s request was a perfect excuse. This year I had rounded up 6 other folks looking to try out the 4 fish mix that GRL offers. Our primary hope was that we would catch the Fall Laker spawn like my son, and I did in 2022.
Getting There
God’s River lodge is fortunate to be at the mouth of the river where it leaves God’s Lake. Less than a mile from the lodge is the indigenous village of God’s River which has around 800 people and an all-season airport which is serviced multiple times a day from Winnipeg. So, get to Winnipeg and you can easily get in and out of God’s River Lodge any day of the week. Since we had a group of 7 and 2 others flying in at the same time the GM at GRL had arranged an evening charter for us. NICE! We were getting in early with no hotel stay in Winnipeg. Home to Lodge in about 12 hours! Thanks COREY! BTW. Corey is the new GM at GRL and he is doing a great job! Trip wouldn’t have nearly as smooth without his hard work.
Camp Life
The lodge operates as a full-service American Plan lodge. Several days we took advantage of shore lunches which are always a highlight of any Canadian trip. It is always nice to get out of the boat for an hour and stretch and the guides always seemed to find nice places that are out of the wind and weather. Speak of weather we WON big time. Other than days 1/2 which were highs in the 50s with drizzling rain. We had sunny and 60-70 the rest of the week. A big difference than the snow we saw in 2022. Food was excellent in 2022. The breakfasts and dinners were not as good in 2023. The cooks tried super hard but just kept falling short. I really don’t know if it was the quality of the food or talent of the cooks but 2022 was excellent. 2023 was not as good.
Fishing Techniques
Pike – There were numerous weed beds that the guides put us on in 10 feet or so of water whenever we wanted to chase pike. It was strange that some were off the chart just stacked with fish and some were dead zones. Didn’t really bother us too much. If one was slow, we’d motor to the next one. Fishing pike was super easy. Doctor spoons in the 3.5-inch size was good as was paddle tail with big jigs.
Big fish for the week 46 in / 44 in / 43 in / several more 40s. In general, the sheer number of fish was excellent in the 24–34-inch range. The last day all three boats sat on one huge mid lake weed bed and hammered the fish. The net result was somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pike that day. At one point 5 of the 7 of us had fish on at once. In my boat alone we had many doubleheaders. It was just an epic beat down on pike. I do wish I could’ve converted some of the 40+ follows I saw but I did land one 40+ that day.
Lakers – Mid-Lake boulder fields were working best. Again, it was mostly a spoon bite with Half Waves / Doctors / Daredevils all working. Compared to 2022 when we had multiple 100 trout days it was slower. We did see 5-6 per hour casting/trolling shallow on average and we could see the fish laying in the boulders they just weren’t quite ready to commit. I expect the sudden weather shift from normal fall temps to the much warmer sunnier days may have stalled the fall spawn while we were there. We still caught multiple MB master anglers (35+ in Trout), but it just wasn’t quite the same.
Best trout day – George had a 35/36/35 in one afternoon which isn’t bad!
Walleyes – To be honest we only messed with them for an hour or two, but we did catch some lunch fish and the average size was quite good 21+ inches. Rumor has it in June walleyes are a matter of how many do you want to catch.
Brookies – The reason I love GRL lodge is the river. It is stunningly beautiful and out of the beautiful series of runs and pools fitting comes the most beautiful freshwater fish outside your aquarium – The Brook Trout. Some people will make a case for the Artic Char but for my money a fall run colored up male bookie wins the title. Spring / Summer or Fall they aren’t a number of fish. What this means is each one is precious because you aren’t going to go out and catch 50 a day. A super day might be 5/10/20. The nice thing about God’s River is the sheer size of the fish. An average sized Brook Trout in GR is around 18 inches. They can grow to 26-30 inches and push towards 8-10lbs. There are probably 3 places in North America where you can reasonably find 6 lb. brook trout and GR is one of them. Ok. To be perfectly honest the huge fish are rare, but they are there. I had a follow up to the boat in the 25 in class, but just seeing that sized fish in the river means you have come to the right place.
In Spring the fishing favors spinners and flies. In the Fall the bite is mostly on smaller cranks. I learned in 2022 and even more so in 2023 that mid-sized cranks are better than tiny cranks and erroring on the larger size is better. Surprisingly the 18–20-inch fish have no problem taking 3.5-to-4.0-inch Rapalas. The best color is the brook trout pattern in countdowns or gold in shad raps.
This year’s goal was to get a bit further from the lodge. Fishing with one guide you can fish the first -3-5 miles of the river and there are brookies there. My son and I landed 4 and had 2 others lost boat-side in 3-hour sessions. Later in the week I got the chance to stretch ooout a bit from camp and travel 20 miles downriver (North in this case) to the 20 miles rapids. WOW! Think of a stretch of river more than a mile wide falling at a rate of 5-10 feet per 100 yards with 100s of boulders in the size of VW Beetles forming pools of slack water in an otherwise torrent of water. The goal would be to drift backwards using the motor to slow our progress while I casted small Raps to these pools. The guide expertly slowed our drift using about 50% throttle and slide across the river so I could target all the pools. AND the pools were holding my precious brookies. On the first drift which lasted about 90 minutes I managed to land 6 trout and hook many more. It is a real challenge to land the fish which seemed to know the drill. Grab my lure and run into the fastest water they could find which made it a real challenge to land the fish given the speed of the water.
My day upriver was awesome and something I look forward to repeating again soon!
Total Trout in the net 13 biggest was right around 20 inches.
Wrap
Fishing – Very Good
Camp – Good
Travel –Easy
Guides – Good
Value – Excellent