Cree Lake Lodge, Pike Capital of the World

Fishing is so unpredictable. My fishing partner, Gene Colling, and I constantly theorize and speculate and curse about it. When you have some fantastic fishing, you never know if all the “stars” (i.e. season, lure or fly, leader, line, color, speed of retrieve, location, depth, distance from shore, water depth, shoreline vegetation, structure, wind, a great guide, clouds and water temperature, to name a few) just happened to be perfectly aligned or whether it’s commonly that good.

 

As far as catching monster pike goes, I haven’t found anything better than Cree Lake, and I choose to believe every ‘star” doesn’t have to be aligned to get it. More likely, it seems, it’s frequently like that. I’m certainly expecting it to be the same when I go back.

 

Sadly, we had only two days at Cree Lake, but we had spectacular success during our short stay, especially with big pike. We caught eleven northerns over 40-inchs in about eight hours of fishing, including Gene’s gigantic 47-incher and a big-shouldered 44-incher that couldn’t resist my special homemade fly--my biggest ever on a fly rod. Gene landed five trophy pike in one spot in about 45 minutes.

 

Frank Morris, our 75-year-old native guide, sort of shrugged it off like it was just a normal day at the office, but I’d like to hear from anybody who has ever done better than that.

 

I’m not saying the same couldn’t happen on a lot of lakes up in Pike Heaven, northern Saskatchewan, but Gene and I have spend a grand total of about three months fishing for pike there, and it’s only happened to us once, here at Cree Lake. In most lakes, you catch a lot of small pike and a few big pike, but at Cree Lake we had a hard time catching one small enough for shore lunch.

 

Andrew Schreiber along with his wife Rachelle and three sons, Adam, Brandon and Darrelle, recently purchased historic Cree Lake Lodge, which was built back in 1954. They also own Pierce Lake Lodge, which is a drive-in fishing camp, but plan to sell it and concentrate on making Cree Lake Lodge one of the best in Saskatchewan.

 

You’d think the owners would trumpet the incredible fishing when I ask them my “what’s different about your lodge” question, and they do, sort of.

 

Yep, Brandon agrees, “the fishing is the best.”

 

“But it’s also the environment,” Brandon’s father Andrew adds. “Where are you going to find another lake like this?” he asks. “The landscape and location are better than most lodges.”

 

Cree Lake is the third largest body of water in northern Saskatchewan, topped only by Athabasca and Reindeer lakes. It’s 50 by 80 kilometers and has about 500 islands, which converts into somewhere around 2,500 kilometers of shoreline.

 

Cree Lake encompasses both the famous Athabasca Oil Sands and Precambrian Shield regions of Saskatchewan. This means part of the lake looks a lot like other shield lakes, but the rest is dotted with sandy slopes and beaches. Some of the bays, like a couple we used for shore lunch, almost look like they could’ve been on a South Pacific atoll.

 

With that incredible resource and the fishing it produces, you’d think the lake would have several lodges, but no, Cree Lake Lodge is the only operating fishing camp on the massive lake. Two other lodges have operated in the past, but they both were closed in 2010.

 

One more difference is how Cree Lake Lodge views its customers. “We really care for our guests,” both Brandon and Andrew emphasized, but went on to say he didn’t want too many of them.

 

“We’ll be putting the money back into the business to make this as good as it can be for our guests,” Andrew explained. “We want to keep the number of clients to a manageable level so they get higher quality service and a better fishing experience.”

 

 

Original content by Bill Schneider from New West Travel and Outdoors. Video by Gene Colling.