HELL AND GONE
So, by the time you’re reading this FP, I’ll have been into Mystery Lake X in northern Saskatchewan for five days.  I’m writing this as we’re packing up the trucks with gear.  Leaving at dawn (4:00 AM up here) on Tuesday and driving for about four hours to the Alberta/Saskatchewan border to meet my cousin Jimmy who has already made a trip into the lake to take in a couple of sixteen foot boats and motors. He says it was a hell of a trip because the ice wasn’t completely gone from the lakes and streams that we have to navigate to get into our lake. It was slush ice all the way in.
Anyway, from Jimmy’s place we have another five hour drive into Saskatchewan and then about a five hour boat and portage trip up the connecting waterways to his camp. We’re going in two more boats with enough fuel for all four boats, plus food, gear and booze for 9 days. We’re also taking in a quad to pull boats from one lake to another by way of a portage track Jimmy cut through the bush a few years back. This is a real expedition! The idea is to get all this stuff into camp by dark, which should be possible because it doesn’t get really dark at all at this latitude.  Pyko is here at my brother’s house in Red Deer and we sat up till 5:00 AM drinking whisky last night after arriving – me from New Zealand and Pyko from Scotland.  We decided to run right through our jet lag by this tactic. We sank a bottle of Macallan between us so weren’t exactly brain surgeons this morning.  In fact, I could have used a brain surgeon this morning.  
Looking at a map of the fishing grounds is pretty amazing.  From the looks of it, northern Saskatchewan is mostly water. And it’s all got fish in it. We go up this single gravel mine road, then pull off, leave the trucks at the side of the road and throw the boats into this little creek.  The creek leads us into a maze of lakes and more creeks that are the headwaters of the Churchill River.  Al and I have been trying to figure out if there are any Arctic Grayling in the lake, but it appears not.  For some reason, according to some fisheries papers we found, grayling are absent from much of the Churchill.  That’s odd because they seem to be in every other waterway up there.  Maybe we’ll find some, living out their anxious lives among all those pike and lakers.  In lieu of grayling, we’re going to target the lake whitefish if we see them rising for chironomids or something. Full debriefing next Sunday.  It’s all about to happen!