May 25th, 2009: The boats are in, the ice is almost all gone, Aswap has a group of 6 who have landed 15 trophies in three days – one on the 1st cast of the trip! – Joint Lake has a group of 4 who went in yesterday and here at Bolton we have a group of 4 enjoying the lake all to themselves! We still have a few chunks of ice around the lake but that should be gone today or tomorrow with this strong warm West wind. We’ve been fishing around these ice flows for a few days already, they’ve stayed around for much longer than I ever expected. Normally when we have some large sections of lake open, it’s a matter of just 2-3 days before the entire lake is open but this year it took over a week before the main lake fully broke open.
Most of our supplies are now in but we’re still waiting on our fuel for the season. We’re planning to get all the fuel in this week assuming there are no further delays. It’s a good thing we had a few barrels left from last season to get us started this year!
The kitchen staff are all back from last year, so again our guests will be treated to the best meals we have served to date! Aimee will be taking meal orders and serving in the bar again this season, she’s excited to see everybody this season along with some new faces. We had a larger turn over with guides this season than we’re used to but the new group has a lot of great potential. We spent the last few days showing the new guys the lake, and today we spent the morning doing our guide training program and now they’re out catching fish for a huge shore dinner for all the staff. This will be my first fish of the season, so I’m looking forward to this training!
To open Aswap last week, we had to charter a float plane in from over 100 miles away because every other lake in our area still had too much ice for a float plane. We put in all new boat seats at both Aswap and Joint Lake and new motors at both camps as well.
Our float plane made it in late Saturday evening so we had to open Joint Lake as we were bringing in the group of anglers on Sunday morning. We spent most of the day at Joint Lake and tomorrow we’ll be setting up the Brook Trout river and rebuilding the dock at Aswap Lake. The new Cessna 206 we have for this season is a great performer and our pilot Ursula comes with over 6000 hours of experience in many different types of planes!
Joint Lake still has a large chunk of ice that’s blocking the river exit but the river is wide open and the guys should be fishing the rest of the lake within the next couple of days.
Please check back often along with our weather page for the most recent updates of how the season is progressing and what to expect for when you arrive. I’ll start getting camera cards from the guests and staff so that I can get some more pictures going. Yesterday Doug Murray and his daughter and her boyfriend flew in for the day with their Beach Bonanza, here are some of their pictures.
