by Bret Amundson

The first sports show of the season for me is the All Canada Show in St Charles, Ill. Last year, this show went to a new venue at the Kane County Fairgrounds after the closure of Pheasant Run. While I liked Pheasant Run – not just for the name – but it was a hotel, restaurant, bar and event center all wrapped into one. While the fairgrounds lack some of those amenities, it serves its intended purpose just fine. Lots of parking and lots of space for the booths.

In 2015, I made my first trip to Tazin Lake Lodge in northwestern Saskatchewan. This lake boasts depths of 400-500 feet (with an 900 foot hole), and I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was hosting Northland Outdoors TV at the time and our National Sales manager Greg Kaiser stopped by my desk and said:

“Hey do you want to try to catch a world record lake trout?”

I almost spit my coffee all over the floor.

When Greg was doing the same job for Babe Winkelman a few years back, plans to visit the lodge were cancelled when a previous owner closed it for a number of years. Trevor Montgomery and a few others had purchased the camp and it was reopened for business with a solid 5 years of rest on the lake. While it doesn’t see much pressure on a normal year, having virtually zero anglers for that span of time is only going to make things better.

We spent 7 days there and it was epic. If you didn’t see my story in the network of Forum Communications newspapers (or the Pioneer Press), you can read it here now. You can also read about my experience there on the Tourism Saskatchewan website here. You can read about here with In Fisherman as well.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, should you choose to read those articles, but just know that you couldn’t have scripted it any better.

Since then, I’ve made it back every summer, aside from the covid break that I’m desperately trying to forget.

Forum Communications made the regrettable decision to cancel Northland Outdoors (the tv show, the magazine and the radio show) after one season, but as one door closes, another opens. I was hired to host Prairie Sportsman shortly after, but since we limit our filming to Minnesota, I worked with the lodge to create YouTube content, stills and material for a new website, brochures and more. It started with short videos but quickly grew into Tazin TV. This is an episodic show on the Tazin Lake Lodge YouTube channel that features the trophy fishing opportunities with stories of the anglers that visit, the crew that works there and some of the unique history of the region.

The Tazin Lake “ecoregion” is unique to the province. While the south resembles the Dakotas or western Minnesota with it’s sprawling, flat prairie, northern Saskatchewan is home of the majority of the 100,000+ lakes and rivers in the province, giving anglers a remote fishing paradise. The Canadian Shield makes an epic appearance between Lake Athabasca/Fond du Lac River and the Northwest Territories, where Tazin is located. 300 foot cliffs and rocky hills rise up high along the shoreline, creating a natural barrier around the lake increasing the difficult of accessing the body of water. Float planes make an appearance every 5 days, bringing new anglers with big smiles and shuffling home the previous guests with even bigger smiles and sore arms.

I’ve been fortunate to catch 50+ pound lakers and many pike over the 40″ mark including one in 2021 that hit the magical 50″ mark. But I’ve also witnessed personal bests get broken almost daily over the years. In 2018, while filming for Tazin TV, I watched Trevor Montgomery catch two pike over 50″ four days apart!

If I wrote here about all the big fish I’ve seen people catch, the internet would need more gigabytes.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about these big fish at various sports shows including the All Canada Show this weekend in the Chicago area and then at the Northwest Sports Show in Minneapolis March 14 – 17th. If you’re in these areas, stop by the Tazin Lake Lodge booth, say hi and find out if we can get you on the plane to one of my favorite places on the planet this summer.