Nice walleye! Yup, that’s Bob Doolittle in the photo, and that Walleye hit on the second cast on the first day of his first trip to Miminiska Lake. Bob has a great history with Wilderness North (2005 largest Pike in Ontario) and this year he brought his son Michael for the first time. Both are participating in the “Gulp VS Live” study. In fact Bob has made arrangements with the University of Wisconsin to tabulate the results of the field study so he has taken a peek at the current surveys each angler completes just to get a feeling for “How’s it goin” Plus he has now fished six hours with the bait and has a personal feeling as well.

“It’s funny,” the University Professor comments,” Some of our anglers have said the claim – good as live – is true, and a few have said “no way!” His group, eleven strong, will have posted 99 hours of “in the field” testing or should we say “on the water” testing by the end of their trip on Friday. Bob was quite impressed. He had fished with Gulp Alive in Northern Wisconsin earlier in the spring with “so-so” results. But he told us, for him, it met his expectations these past few days with marked advantage over live bait, both in terms of staying on the hook, ease of handling and catching plenty of Miminiska Walleyes.

The study is not based on feelings, since each participant fills out an actual log of their fishing results after three hours of angling with nothing but Gulp or live minnows. The log records the number of small, medium and large fish, the angler’s experience level, and lake and weather conditions and the big UW computer crunches the numbers. If you are coming to Wilderness North this summer, and are fishing live bait, we will provide the log sheets and the Gulp so that you too can take part in the study. And even if you are not coming, we will post the general results of the “in the field face off” on our website this fall. A full report, available as a PDF file will be sent to those who request it.