Northern Saskatchewan, Canada – And we mean northern Saskatchewan. This place is miles from nowhere, just south of the Northwest Territories, where the deer and the polar bears roam.
Fishing country, in other words.
Back in the day, men with 5 o’clock shadows slept in dilapidated cabins for the chance to go mano a mano with trophy-size fish in the frigid waters of Saskatchewan’s Wollaston Lake. No more. Not since Mike and Judy Lembke arrived on the scene.
Lembke was one of those men. He would fly in from Illinois, where he owned a successful mail-order business, in pursuit of trophy northern pike, walleye and lake trout, with the occasional Arctic grayling finding its way into his boat, too. The fishing was great, but the accommodations were spartan at best.
“We used to say, ‘Hey, if you owned this place, what would you do with it?”‘ Lembke said.
The answer came in 1999 when he bought Wollaston Lake Lodge and began the process of transforming it into a world-class fishing operation with five-star accommodations. Thankfully, our group didn’t arrive until the summer of 2005, by which time all the creature comforts had been put into place.
What kind of creature comforts? It’s hard to know where to begin. The lodge, with its wall-to-wall cedar and 34-foot-high cathedral ceiling, is your basic Club Med North. You begin your day with an omelette or French toast and end it with surf and turf or rack of lamb or some exotic dish prepared by one of the four – count ’em, four – chefs.
After a long day on the water, you can stretch out on a leather recliner in your cabin, break a sweat in the exercise room or go for the executive workout – a sauna and a massage from the staff masseuse. Other amenities include a movie room, video games, a computer room and a fully stocked bar. Well, of course. How could a day of fishing and relaxation be complete without a Courvoisier nightcap?
“The goal was to build a place that had the facility, equipment and staff that we felt was on a par with the fishing,” Lembke said. “Everybody has asked me why we put so much money into the place. The answer is we’re not in it for the short term.”
Lembke and his wife employ a staff of more than 40. There’s daily maid service in the cabins, a dock staff that fills coolers with cold beer and shore-lunch kits, and guides who do everything but swat mosquitoes for the paying customers.
Most people use crankbait, but Lembke estimates that 20 percent of his customers fly-fish, an experience he equates to “hand-to-hand combat.” While you spend much of the day fishing, you never rig your pole or touch the fish or any other such hardship.
That’s the guide’s job, along with creating exotic shore lunches.
We dined every day on walleye and northern pike, some fried in beer batter, others with a curry or Cajun concoction. The potato preparations ranged from American fries to fried potato chips to waffle fries.
Make no doubt, the VIP treatment isn’t cheap. The cost for four days of fishing, including charter-jet service from Winnipeg to Sas- katchewan, was $3,195. Add in $200-plus for each fly-out to a distant part of the lake – it’s 130 miles long and 30 miles wide – plus airfare to Winnipeg and a tip for your guide, and you’re approaching, if not exceeding $5,000.
Five grand for a fishing trip? According to Lembke, the price tag makes Wollaston Lake Lodge the most expensive stop in the country. You want to spend more, you have to go to Alaska and fish for salmon.
“We’re the industry standard,” Lembke said. “Hey, you either go big or go home.”
The lodge caters to a niche audience. Lembke’s average customer is 57 years old. Baby boomers who have made enough money to live comfortably. Men, and some women, who have grown tired of lugging equipment and tackle through mosquito-infested woods to fish a lake that may or may not be worth the work.
It’s no coincidence that our group, friends and clients of my brother, Bob, a financial planner in Madison, Wis., included four lawyers, two doctors and the co-captains of the Green Bay Packers’ 1960s dynasty – offensive tackle Bob Skoronski and Hall of Fame defensive end Willie Davis. As if the obligatory fish stories weren’t enough, we got to hear daily anecdotes about Vince Lombardi, who nicknamed Davis Dr. Feelgood because of his infectious attitude and love for the game.
As usual, I was the least experienced fisherman in the group. My brother and I had taken half a dozen trips to Ontario through the years, but never had we indulged in the kind of luxury that’s commonplace at Wollaston Lake. Nor had we ventured to Canada with a specific goal in mind – to catch trophy northern pike.
Truth is, northern are more of a nuisance than anything else on most Canadian lakes. Most are relatively small – snakes, we call them – but not so small that they can’t snap your line and take your lure with them. That isn’t the case at Wollaston, where barbless hooks, no nets and catch-and-release on big northerns are the rules of the game.
The catch-and-release program, combined with bountiful amounts of bait fish, enable the pike to grow big and strong. So who caught the biggest northern in our group? I’m the one who’s asking, so you already know the answer.
Yes, in a page right out of “The Old Sports Writer and the Sea,” I snagged a 44 1/2-inch, 27-pounder, twice as big as any other pike I had ever caught. And, of course, there was a story involved. We had just wrapped up our third day on the water when I told our guide, Rich Umpherville, “Let me throw one more into the weeds over there.”
Sure enough, my Mepps spinner attracted a customer. Ten minutes later, despite my best efforts to lose it, Rich pulled the lunker out of the water. While it was the biggest of the week in our group, we caught several others that measured 40 inches-plus and weighed more than 20 pounds.
Davis, Dr. Feelgood himself, caught the biggest lake trout in the group. Two days later, he sat on a tree stump during a group shore lunch – beer-batter walleye and a northern and walleye stir fry were the headliners on the menu – and breathed in the surroundings as he clutched a cold beer.
“The Doctor,” he said, “is feelin’ good.”
Jim Armstrong can be reached at 303-820-5452 or jmarmstrong@denverpost.com.
