My first trip to Coopers’ Minipi Lodges many years ago was a learning experience. I caught a lot of small and medium sized Brook Trout and one 5 3/4 pound Arctic Char. But, the last day at Minonipi Lake turned out to be my best of the trip. I had been running a big black, weighted Wooly Bugger through the narrows between two lakes when it suddenly stopped. Thinking I was hung up on the bottom once again, I pulled upward and to the side slowly to try to dislodge it from the rock.. But the rock slowly swam away… upstream.

It seems I had a big fish on finally. He took me out into the current and rapidly took me into my backing. I jumped from boulder to boulder and reached shore, and started pulling from the side to get him out of the heavy current. Once I got him to the net he really became active. He bounced around in the net so much that we couldn’t get an accurate weight on him. I managed to get a few photos of him and measured him… a little over 24 inches. We released him as soon as we could and watched him swim away.

That big Brookie made my trip…. and he became the inspiration for a painting. The Minipi system is famous for its Brook Trout, and rightfully so. These trout are not just big, they are deep bodied, energetic and extremely colorful. I finally caught one of Minipi’s huge Brook Trout and held him in my hands for a few moments before releasing him. What a thrill.

Guide Ray Best first introduced me to “bass bug” fishing for Minipi brook trout. Neither streamer, nymph, nor dry fly generated any action on this particular day, years ago. Ray handed me a huge, green, deer hair bass frog, which I laughingly handed back, but he persisted and urged me to tie it on. So, more to humor him, although I was still not convinced that this was a sound and legitimate strategy for trout, I greased it thoroughly and cast it across the fast waters at the head of Woody’s Hole, which lies at the base of the flowage coming out of Anne Marie Lake. My jaw hung agape and my eyes bugged out when, on the first retrieve, I saw several huge fish chasing it through the rapids and bouncing the monstrous fly into the air with their snouts.

I recalled that experience several years ago on a return trip to the same lodge. “It was déjà vu all over again”, as Yogi Berra was wont to say. Similar conditions, similar slow fishing, same spot. I knotted on a large caribou hair lemming fly. On the second cast, as I stripped and popped it across the swirling water, the five-and-one-half-pound hen fish pictured here poked her dark snout into the air and pulled the bug down. The moral? Never leave home for Minipi without a few spun hair “bass bugs”, mice, lemmings, or frogs. They double as great “brook trout bugs”. Incidentally, since then I have also taken trout on regular hard-body, painted, cork popping bugs too.

You will fish these lures best with an eight-weight rod and line, and a relatively short and stout leader. Make your back cast stroke long and exaggerated, in an elliptical or slightly oval path, keeping constant pressure on the rod tip.